Remember, these are American citizens.
The Casa Ismael clinic is short on funds in part because of cuts in food stamps that hit about 1.3 million residents of Puerto Rico this month — a new crisis for an island still struggling from the effects of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. “We just don’t have the money right now,” Izquierdo, 56, said in an interview in the clinic’s sparse first-floor office, where a chunk of ceiling tiles remains missing since the hurricane. Izquierdo pulled out a chart with each patient’s name, annotated with the cost of his adult diapers for the month. “It’s very hard. It is so unfair. That cut is going to kill us.”
The result is that “HIV-positive men with severe health complications” in the clinic get to sit in dirty diapers for hours because the clinic can’t afford to change them when soiled.
The federal government provided additional food-stamp aid to Puerto Rico after the hurricane, but Congress missed the deadline for reauthorization in March as it focused on other issues before leaving for a week-long recess. Federal lawmakers have also been stalled by the Trump administration, which has derided the extra aid as unnecessary. Now, about 43 percent of Puerto Rico’s residents are grappling with a sudden cut to a benefit they rely on for groceries and other essentials.
[…] The island would not need Congress to step in to fund its food-stamp and Medicaid programs if it were a state. For states, the federal government has committed to funding those programs’ needs, whatever the cost and without needing to take a vote. But Puerto Rico instead funds its programs through a block grant from the federal government, which needs to be regularly renewed, and also gives food-stamp benefits about 40 percent smaller than those of states.
While Puerto Rico is dealing with people deciding whether they can afford rice and beans for the week, their president is pitching fits over giving them even the money they are getting.
The impasse comes amid a hardening opposition by the president against extending additional aid to Puerto Rico. Trump sees the island as fundamentally broken and has told advisers that no amount of money will ever fix its systemic problems.
He describes in meetings that large swaths of the island never had power to begin with and that it is “ridiculous” how much money is going to Puerto Rico in food-stamp aid, according to the senior official. He has occasionally groused about how ungrateful political officials in Puerto Rico were for the administration’s help, the official said.
[…] Since then, aides have described a president who regularly brings up the island to make sure it is not getting too much money.
Yeah, Donald — I’m pretty sure they’re not getting too much money. Not while their clinic patients have to sit in dirty diapers and citizens are cutting back on buying milk because of cuts to their food stamps.
Is Puerto Rico broken? Well, it’s a US commonwealth. It’s people are US citizens. We took that island after the Spanish-American War. It’s our now. And, by the universal Law of Commercial Responsibility: You break it, you buy it.
I know that’s difficult for a guy who has a long record of stiffing subcontractors and walking away from deals while leaving others holding the bag … but we have a responsibility to Puerto Rico and its populace — American citizens all — if not just from a matter of humanity, then as a matter of the US Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Which most definitely includes our fellow People in Puerto Rico.