Time to use the ever-growing power of Puerto Rico

[DonViejo]

BY CARLOS ‘JOHNNY’ MENDEZ-NUÑEZ — 01/04/18 10:35 AM EST THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

The island of Puerto Rico, a United States territory since 1898, is making news again, this time by its ever-growing political power. Since 2000, the number of Puerto Ricans living in the states have increased dramatically. According to 2011 U.S. Census’ American Community Survey Report, around 4.9 million people of Puerto Rican origin lived in the continental United States. To that number we need to add the almost 300,000 people who left the island in the great migration wave of 2013-16, as well as the quarter of a million who “escaped” in the wake of the impact of the historic Hurricane María last September. Recent reports had placed the number of Puerto Ricans in the mainland at 5.6 million. This is enormous political power.

Most of Puerto Ricans have moved to states such as Florida, New York and Pennsylvania. A byproduct of this unparalleled migration, which is due to the lack of political equality to the rest of the nation, is that Puerto Ricans now have a massive political clout in several swing states.

In Florida, for example, Orange County alone is now home to nearly 300,000 Puerto Ricans. Overall, Puerto Ricans now number more than a million statewide, a figure which represents 30 percent of all Hispanic registered voters – closing in on the Cuban population of 1.3 million which comprises 32 percent of Hispanic voters. It’s time for the Puerto Ricans community to flex its newly found political power with the aim of helping the near to 3.2 million of U.S. citizens still living in the island.

First, Puerto Rico needs Congress to provide equal funding for all Medicaid programs this year. The current allocation of resources to cover Medicaid expenses for the residents of the island stands at just 55 percent. The minimum any state of the union receives annually is at least 83 percent. This marks a massive discrepancy which, for a territory that is in the middle of a historic recovery effort after María, threatens to destroy our public health care system which provides medical coverage to more than 1.7 million.

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http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/367408-time-to-use-the-ever-growing-power-of-puerto-rico

[IluvPitties]

1. We are here in FL ready to make this state blue for good.

[Phoenix61]

2. Thank you

I love the blue skies and it would be so nice if the politics matched. We can't afford to have the off shore drilling the repubs are pushing for. Apparently, they have completely forgotten about the Horizin spill. With regulations being loosened it is inevitable there will be others.

[Igel]

3. I think the OP plays games with numbers and language.

There's ACA marketplace subsidies, baseline Medicaid with a floor of 50%, and the "new adult group" Enhanced Medicaid funding at 100%. Any Medicaid funding is "complete" when it's the baseline + Enhanced. That rather depends on the state. "Fully funding" Medicaid can mean a state gets around 50% of the Medicaid spending, or it can mean a lot more. It's not just real simple.

PR gets 55% Medicaid of Medicaid paid for, but doesn't have federal income tax because the territorial government picks up some 'federal' services. At the same time, PR also gets an ACA subsidy.

The Medicaid funding site says that standard funding is 50%, but maximum funding is 82%. The lower the average income, the higher the funding. PR gets a waiver from the law, so it's minimum funding is 55%. https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/financing-and-reimbursement/

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/federalstate-share-of-spending/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D for 2016 puts Virginia at 50.2%. Versus "the minimum any state of the union receives annually is at least 83%". The massive discrepancy isn't just with funding levels.

The problem is what's included in the numbers. For PR, the OP doesn't include anything but the minimum baseline. For other states, he includes Enhanced Medicaid and ACA subsidies. It's not comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing live crawfish to oranges. He needs his numbers to be as discordant as possible. He's crawfish-picked his facts ("cherry-picking sounds like fun).

PR does have a problem but manipulating the reader shouldn't be part of the solution. The federal funding sources that the OP writer opted to ignore in the interest of rhetoric and which PR has used through 2017 included a lot of fallbacks. "Once you've used up X, you can use Y. When Y is gone, then you use Z." And some of those are or have run out. But the net effect of all the funding sources has been to sharply increase PR Medicaid (combined, I think, CHIP) spending from just under $1 billion in 2011 to nearly $2.5 billion in 2016. There's going to be a shortfall for all the additional federal spending predicted in 2018, so the 'cut' from 2011 to 2018 will be around $800 million and spending will be, and nobody'll remember the 80 or 90% increase over the last 7 years, they'll just notice the reduction. (This reduction is larger than the shortfall in most other Enhanced Medicaid states as they undergo the planned transition from 100% to 90% of increased funding, so comparing future PR expenditures to past state expenditures simply overlooks effects of the law passed in 2011.) https://www.macpac.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Medicaid-Financing-and-Spending-in-Puerto-Rico.pdf.

The result will be that PR will have to revert back to using territorial funds, which it doesn't have.

But the argument shouldn't include blatant falsehoods. The argument should be able to stand on its own validity.

Now, Irma & Maria've trashed things, to be sure. At the same time, the population will have decreased. It's probably down to around 3 million by now, given out migration. There'll be less capacity to self-fund, but fewer people.