Medical referral patients who need treatment outside the Commonwealth island of Saipan may not have that option for a while after travel agencies stopped issuing them airline tickets due to the government’s nonpayment of $180,000 of arrears owed.
Medical referral patients who need treatment outside the Commonwealth island of Saipan may not have that option for a while after travel agencies stopped issuing them airline tickets due to the government’s nonpayment of $180,000 of arrears owed.
Department of Public Health secretary Joseph Kevin Villagomez confirmed to the Saipan Tribune that travel agencies suspended the processing of travel documents for off-island medical referrals. So far, five to 10 medical referral cases have been affected, all of which are for follow-ups. The CNMI government owes Wings Travel, Pacific Sky, and World Tour and Travel a total of $180,000, admitted Villagomez, and payment for each vendor has been delayed by over a month. “Right now, we are working with the Department of Finance to pay the travel agencies. They have not been paid for awhile so they stopped the processing of medical referral travels for now until they collected the $180,000 obligation.”
Villagomez is working out a payment plan for the government that is so broke that it cannot give a date as to when the payment will be released to vendors, “The Medical Referral Office are communicating with Finance, but I do not know exactly when the cheques will be released because of the cash flow problem of the government.” Payments for the medical referral vendors are separate from the budget of the Department of Public Health, which is too broke to finish its own website, because the money comes from other funding sources.
Since the news broke, only one travel agency allowed medical referral trips to Guam while a total ban was placed on trips to the Philippines and Honolulu. The two other travel agencies implemented a complete ban on all these destinations. Villagomez admitted that emergency cases are the biggest worry they have, “The affected cases are for follow-ups and there is no immediate repercussion if we will delay it by a day or a week. But if we have emergency cases tomorrow, what course do we have other than to plead with these travel agencies to at least temporarily lift the travel ban? We will pay the obligation and it is just a matter of time.” The Department of Public Health spent $16.3 million in the last four fiscal years, ending in fiscal year 2009, to send Commonwealth patients to various medical facilities off island for treatment.
Saipan is the largest island of the United States Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a chain of 15 tropical islands belonging to the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific Ocean. The population is under 60,000. It is a popular tourist destination in the Pacific, 190 km north of Guam.
Travel to and from the island is via Saipan International Airport. Tourism has long been a vital source of the island’s revenue, although the industry has undergone a serious decline, while the other export earner, garment making, closed last year. Some major airlines have since ceased regular service to the island.
With medical facilities on the island poor, people go to Guam or further afield for treatment. In the last two years, other Asia-Pacific islands have had difficulty paying the bills for medical treatment overseas. Those medical tourism destinations seeking business from overseas governments should learn the lesson that it is not a risk free business, as they will certainly be paid late, and maybe not at all.
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