The Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) will pay P 20 billion unpaid claims of the private hospitals before December.

This was announced by PhilHealth Corporate Communication Department Manager Rey Balena Sr. during the ''Laging Handa'' public briefing on Thursday.

"We have major policy issuances, policy actions made recently and it will affect the pending COVID claims. And moving forward, our hospitals can expect that our payment will arrive (soon) , especially for the COVID-19 claims," he said.

Balena assures that PhilHealth is doing its best to speed up the process to release the payment to private hospitals.

"It will not take long because we have mobilized everything that we need to mobilize here. We augment our human resource and our (PhilHealth president and CEO), si Atty. (Dante) Gierran, is monitoring our regional offices to speed up the process," he said.

"We are doing our best for the immediate release of their payments," he added.

Balena said despite the constraints and limitations, PhilHealth has so far paid a total of P152.8 billion from January 2020 until October 28, 2021.

"It is a huge amount and despite the limitations we were able to released this amount and it represents to around 75 percent of the whole claims that we have received," he said. Robina Asido/DMS