Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) starts implementing its premium adjustment for formal economy members this year.
The adjustment will be applied to employees’ PhilHealth premiums for the month of January, when employers will remit and report to PhilHealth this February.
Although the law allows PhilHealth to collect up to five percent of an employee’s basic monthly salary for insurance premiums, it previously charged only 2.5 percent.
This year, that rate has been adjusted to 2.75 percent, which is a .25 percent difference, along with the new monthly salary base of P10,000 and salary cap of P40,000.
To compute the monthly premium, multiply the basic monthly salary by .0275 (or 2.75 percent).
The new minimum monthly premium rate of employees earning below the salary base of P10,000 is P275 or 2.75% of P10,000; while for those earning above the salary cap of P40,000, the new maximum premium rate is P1,100 or 2.75 percent of P40,000.
However, only 50 percent of the computed monthly premium rate will be deducted from the employee’s pay.
The other 50 percent will be paid for by the employer.
In a forum with company managers and representatives of small, medium and large enterprises from Eastern, Central and Western Visayas, PhilHealth-7 Vice President William O. Chavez explained that the corporation has been rolling out several new benefit packages and expanding its coverage without corresponding premium increase.
Chavez cited PhilHealth’s Z Benefit Packages for catastrophic medical cases, such as the P600,000 coverage for low risk kidney transplantation and the P550,000 coverage for coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
PhilHealth has been putting measures in place to ensure sustainability of the PhilHealth fund for its members. Aside from the slight adjustment in the premium rate of employed members, PhilHealth strongly discourages missing premium payments among informal economy members (individually-paying, voluntary, etc.), and encourages non-members to enrol and start paying premium (especially children of members who no longer qualify as dependents) in order to start being entitled to PhilHealth benefits sooner.
Members must have already paid at least nine months of premium within the last 12 months prior to hospitalization to be entitled to coverage.