Tinian Mayor Ramon M. Dela Cruz urged the senators as well as the Finance and Public Health secretaries last week to “decentralize” the program and give the Rota and Tinian people the same services provided to other CNMI residents.
During the public hearing held jointly by the Rota and Tinian legislative delegations on Capital Hill Thursday, Dela Cruz said in the past, each island administered its own medical referral program.
“We have done that in the past when I was senator. I don’t know why we had to centralize it now,” he said, adding that Rota and Tinian can take care of travel requests — provided there is sufficient funds, training and a fair policy.
“I know some people might argue that it is the patient’s responsibility to finance their medical needs,” Dela Cruz said.
But the mayor said the people of Tinian are going through “hardship on a daily basis.”
Unlike the Commonwealth Health Center on Saipan, he said the Tinian Health Center does not have full medical services, having only one doctor and one nurse practitioner. Many of the patients with severe or complicated cases have to be flown to Saipan, the airfare for which many Tinian residents cannot afford, the mayor said.
Tinian residents who work for the government and were previously earning $18,000 to $20,000 annually are now receiving only $14,000 to $16,000 due to work hour cuts, he added.
A typical Tinian government worker gets a salary of $200 per payday, and he has to stretch this amount for food, gas, utilities and other expenses, Dela Cruz said.
When somebody’s ill in the family, there is usually no money left for a plane ticket to Saipan which is $69 or $138 if an escort is needed, he added.
Dela Cruz said due to the lack of dialysis treatment facilities on Tinian, there are 19 patients and their escorts who permanently reside at a guesthouse on Saipan.
These people, he added, have to endure the inconvenience of being away from their families.
He said the Tinian municipal government spends over $300,000 a year just to operate the guesthouse.
That money, he added, should not be used for inter-island medical referrals which he said are the responsibility of the Department of Public Health’s medical referral administration.
But Dela Cruz said without a funding source, transferring the program to the municipality is impractical and irresponsible at this will only add to Tinian’s financial woes.
Speaker Eli D. Cabrera, R-Saipan, in an interview on Friday said it is the central government that must have control over medical referral services.
The administration, he said, should screen medical referral patients before they are transported.
He said some medical referral escorts stay on Saipan for too long, requiring a higher subsistence allowance from the government.
“We need to have accountability here,” he said.
Variety learned that last year, the inter-island medical referral program for Rota and Tinian cost $305,660.
But according to Dela Cruz, this amount is less than 1 percent of the total CNMI budget. Services, he said, were provided to 2,236 patients on Tinian, and each were given $136.
Given this “nominal” cost, the mayor said “it’s unreasonable to say that the CNMI government cannot provide sufficient funding for the program.”
He noted that the subsistence allowance for the members of the Legislature or funding for sports programs are far costlier than the inter-island referral program.
