OFWs to pay higher PhilHealth premiums next year

MANILA, Philippines – Starting next week, millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) will pay twice the amount they are paying in insurance premiums to the state-owned PhilHealth Corp., Batangas Rep. Mark Llandro Mendoza revealed yesterday.

This developed as thousands of OFWs, who spent the holidays in the Philippines, flocked to the departure area of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport yesterday to go back to their work abroad.

“The 100-percent increase is the state insurance agency’s Christmas and New Year’s gift to our overseas workers, whom we call heroes,” Mendoza said sarcastically.

Before Christmas, Mendoza said PhilHealth issued Circular No. 22-11 which increased OFWs’ annual premium payments from P900 to P1,200 starting January and to P2,400 beginning in July.

He said the huge increase is unconscionable since many OFWs are affected by economic difficulties in their host countries, forcing them to reduce their remittances to their families back home.

He added that aside from their PhilHealth premiums, these workers also pay an annual fee in US dollars to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration.

He pointed out that additionally, they pay the government a certain amount whenever they renew their contracts or return to their overseas jobs after a short vacation or visit here, he said.

“OFWs are perhaps the most overcharged among Filipino workers,” Mendoza said.

Mendoza heads the Nationalist People’s Coalition bloc in the House of Representatives, which supported the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona.

He urged President Aquino to stop PhilHealth from enforcing its circular on the doubling of annual premium payments of the “unsung heroes of the our economy.”

“The increase is both drastic and unjustified. PhilHealth should be true to its mandate to serve the people, instead of acting like a financial monster that it wants to be. We cannot be insensitive to the plight of our overseas workers,” he said.

Meanwhile, additional personnel have been deployed at the NAIA to help facilitate the processing of documents of departing OFWs who spent Christmas here with their families.

Airport officials said since Nov. 28, 2011, the airport’s arrival area has been filled with mostly OFW passengers from Middle East countries, along with balikbayans and tourists from the United Kingdom, United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia.

Immigration supervisors Boy Aquino and Elsie Lucero said they were not expecting this huge crowd at this time, since the volume of departing passengers normally increases on the first week of January.

The Department of Health (DOH), on the other hand, has expressed concerns over the shift in the mode of transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus/ Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) among OFWs this year.

According to DOH Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag, they have observed that 58 percent of the 227 OFWs who contracted the AIDS virus from January to October 2011 belonged to the sector of “males who have sex with males (MSM).”—-Jess Diaz (The Philippine Star) with Rudy Santos, Sheila Crisostomo