{"id":14777,"date":"2009-10-01T16:55:39","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T21:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=14777"},"modified":"2009-10-01T16:55:39","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T21:55:39","slug":"puerto-ricans-want-free-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=14777","title":{"rendered":"Puerto Ricans want free health care"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I wrote earlier, I bumped into a rally outside of the Senate offices on Capitol Hill this morning. The rally was largely Puerto Ricans who were upset that they are being left out of the Federal health care reform. They complained that they were being treated like second class citizens because they weren’t being included in the massive government plan. Here’s the video I took of one gentleman’s speech – in Spanish and then English;<\/p>\n

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They were careful to say that they were only interested in government health care for LEGAL US citizens, that they didn’t want to be treated like second class citizens. Well, that’s all well and good – I can appreciate that. However, Puerto Ricans who still live on the island are treated better than US citizens.<\/p>\n

Puerto Ricans pay their Social Security taxes (payroll tax) and their local taxes, like we all pay. However, they don’t pay income tax. They have a State healthcare system, like the rest of the US and they get Federal money from the US government. Just the other day, Puerto Rico asked for a federal bailout for their $3.2b deficit. Their economy has been in free fall since they forced the Navy to close their Vieques gunnery range and the military closed most of their facilities.<\/p>\n

Try as I might, I can’t find a good solid number on how much we already spend on Puerto Rico to keep it as a territory, but if it’s more than a dollar, it’s too much. <\/p>\n

But what really ges me about the video is that the guy gives the speech in Spanish. And then one guy yells out “Viva Puerto Rico” and everyone joins in the chant. They want US taxpayer dollars, but they can’t say it in English? They can’t even chant “Viva Estados Unidos”? They have a word for that in Spanish – “ingraciados”.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I’m probably a racist – I’m watching Telemundo while I type this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I wrote earlier, I bumped into a rally outside of the Senate offices on Capitol … Puerto Ricans want free health care<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-health-care-debate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}