Citizens’ Battle Against Corruption (CIBAC) party-List Rep. Eddie Villanueva has filed House Resolution 2127 directing the appropriate House committee to investigate the Commission on Audit’s (COA) reports flagging the Department of Health (DOH) for billions of pesos worth of expired, nearly expired, damaged, overstocked, excessive, slow-moving and undistributed drugs, medicines, and medical supplies from 2021 to 2023.
“This report is very alarming. Billions and billions of pesos have been put into waste due to lack of a proper system and management. With insufficiency of budget to fund the basic public healthcare, such kind of wastage is not really acceptable,” he said.
The COA reports showed billions worth of medical supplies were found wasted or mismanaged, including P85 million for 2021, P7.4 billion in 2022 and P11.18 billion in 2023. The DOH repeatedly failed to address systemic issues in procurement, inventory and distribution.
“We would want to know why there is wastage by the DOH, or items are just at the warehouses, especially there is a bigger budget for the procurement of medicines in 2025. We have to scrutinize this,” Villanueva cited.
Despite the findings, the proposed 2025 budget for the purchase of drugs, medicines and medical supplies is increased significantly to ₱44.5 billion.
