The upcoming human crisis in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico, a United States territory with an estimated population around 3.6 million, is facing a true human crisis if the federal government doesn’t intervene in the next few weeks. In a nutshell, in less than a year more than 700,000 U.S. citizens living on the island could be stripped of their healthcare insurance, leaving them without any means to tackle their basic health conditions. It’s certainly a catastrophe in the making, and sadly, it’s Congress and the White House which has put America’s citizens at risk.

It’s well known that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory; a colony if you will, of the United States. Although Puerto Ricans have their U.S. citizenship, granted by law (Jones Act of 1917), Washington still threats us like second class citizens. Nowhere is that deficiency more marked than in healthcare. A simple X-Ray into Puerto Rico’s public healthcare system will be enough to comprehend the magnitude of the problem.

As of today, there are more than 1.6 million American citizens receiving healthcare services through the public system. That’s nearly 47 percent of our population. In fact, if we add the people under Medicare, roughly one million, three quarters of our population receive federal allocations to cover their healthcare needs.

In 2012, the Affordable Health Care Patient for America Act, better known as ObamaCare, assigned the territory of Puerto Rico a lump sum of $6.3 billion to cover health expenses through Fiscal Year 2018. Those funds elevated the federal reimbursement level for Puerto Rico, from a pathetic 25 percent, to a more plausible 55 percent. Before 2012, Puerto Rico received an average of $325 million to cover all expenses. The local government supplemented this with massive infusions of cash, which eventually drained our coffers. As its stands, in less than a year, the ObamaCare funds will be extinguished, leaving us without any hope of mantling the current level of service.

Let me be clear about one thing, if Puerto Rico were to become a state, we are set to receive no less than 83 percent of all health-related expenses through the federal government. That’s enough to continue covering our most vulnerable, our children and the elderly. But Congress have yet to act on the admission of Puerto Rico, despite having a mandate of our people, expressed free and democratically in the 2012 status referendum which statehood won with a robust 61 percent of the vote.

Despite this, Congress have dragged its feet. For decade, the local government covered for this inaction, but the longest economic recession in the history of the United States has left us without any cash reserve or the ability to generate loans. There’s no where to run.

So, we are back to where I started this column, telling the American people that nearly a million of its counterparts will be in danger of losing their lives because of inaction by Washington. If the situation is nor corrected soon, and efforts are under way, led by our governor, Ricardo Rosselló, and our resident commissioner, Jenniffer Gonzalez, to secure a bridge fund to fiscal 2020, by next January there will be 700,000 U.S. citizens wandering the streets without any hope of healthcare service. A true human crisis in the making.

Of that total, we have estimated that 300,000 will leave the Island, most likely to Florida, adding to an already large Puerto Rican community. The rest will be without health insurance until Congress grants us statehood. Can a person survive a couple of years without visiting a doctor or receiving its medication? Probably not.

That’s what's at stake.

Angel Martínez-Santiago member of the Puerto Rico state Senate.

BY ANGEL MARTÍNEZ-SANTIAGO
The upcoming human crisis in Puerto Rico