People in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico may not be grappling with the botched Obamacare website rollout, but the program could spell disaster for the island, which is facing a financial crisis and where half the population already is dependent on free health insurance, members of the island's medical community warned.
Puerto Ricans, who are born U.S. citizens, do not enroll on the healthcare.gov because their government decided not to offer health-insurance exchanges, which offers private plans.
Instead, the Affordable Care Act, commonly dubbed Obamacare, has mostly arrived on the island in the form of a $6.3 billion social welfare check allocated to the government to continue to pay for its Medicaid and for its separate, free state-run insurance program called "Mi Salud," between 2014 and 2019.
And that could be disastrous for Puerto Rico.
Roughly 1.7 million Puerto Ricans already depend on free health insurance in the island and local doctors are concerned that the additional financial infusion to the program will make the territory even more dependent on welfare.
Critics in the medical community said the move could prove to be a disaster, considering the U.S. territory is already deemed as the “Next Detroit” and "America's Greece."
The island's government is over $70 billion in debt and about 45 percent of Puerto Ricans have incomes below the U.S. federal poverty line and nearly 40 percent of all households receive food stamps.
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