{"id":44914,"date":"1998-12-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1998-12-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/93eda627-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e"},"modified":"1998-12-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1998-12-23T00:00:00","slug":"93eda63b-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/93eda63b-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e\/","title":{"rendered":"Late payments worry health chief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Health Secretary Joseph Kevin Villagomez yesterday expressed concern over the health department&#8217;s delayed payment to some pharmaceutical firms supplying medicine to the hospital saying this may have a negative impact on the delivery of health care.<\/p>\n<p>Villagomez said DPH has failed to pay for three to four months now several U.S.-based pharmaceutical firms and some local drug distributors. He did not identify them.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re now three to four months behind our payment to our drug vendors. Some of them have already sent us notices. I cannot blame them, especially the local vendors, because they, too, have their own obligations to meet with their suppliers,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>The delayed payments were traced to the cash-strapped government&#8217;s deep financial trouble.<\/p>\n<p>Villagomez expressed fear some vendors will eventually refuse to take orders from the Northern Marianas health-care system because of its bad credit history.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The worst that could happen is for them to refuse taking orders from us,&#8221; the health secretary said.<\/p>\n<p>Records from the Commonwealth Health Center Procurement and Supply Division showed the hospital spent $141,565 for medical supplies last month.<\/p>\n<p>The $56,746 was spent for pharmaceuticals or drugs and about $84,819 was used to buy medical supplies such as disposable syringes, surgical gloves, bandages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Health Secretary Joseph Kevin Villagomez yesterday expressed concern over the health department&#8217;s delayed payment to some pharmaceutical firms supplying medicine to the hospital saying this may have a negative impact on the delivery of health care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}