By Junex Doronio
A RANKING official of the country’s health insurer said there are an estimated five million deceased Filipinos who are still in the database of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).
This was revealed by no less than PhilHealth President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Emmanuel Ledesma, Jr. before a Senate hearing on bills on e-governance on Wednesday, October 25.
“The thing with the PhilHealth database is, my understanding is we have to clean it up because I think there are around 4-5 million people who have already passed away, but hindi pa po natatanggal sa database (they have not been deleted from the database),” Ledesma bared.
He told the Senate panel that they had already coordinated with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to fix the problem of having “ghost members.”
For his part, DICT Undersecretary Jeffrey Ian Dy admitted that the incident happened after it “was left open.”
However, he assured members that despite the seeming “carelessness” of technicians there’s nothing to worry about.
“That website contains nothing. It was a test site that we used for checking vulnerabilities kasi we also have our own vulnerability assessment and penetration testing,” Dy said.
He added: “So siguro ang unfortunate lang is that after the testing it was left open. But we assure the public there’s really nothing there….it really contains no data.”
(ai/mnm)
