‘It’s like the end of the world’ at airport
Travelers wait, swelter as San Juan terminals come back to life
JUAN, SAN PUERTO RICO There’s a new front in this island’s growing humanitarian crisis in the wake of Hurricane Maria: the airport.
Thousands of sweating, hopeful passengers have thronged inside Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, desperate to catch a flight off the storm-ravaged island.
Airlines, which have canceled dozens of flights over the past week, began commercial flights to the U.S. on Sunday. Passengers wait in long lines inside terminals running on backup generators with no air conditioning. Many have spent the night inside the steamy terminals, hoping for a chance to leave.
“It’s like the end of the world,” said Andrew Arteaga, who spent five nights at the airport with his wife, Marjet Mendez, and 8month-old daughter, Ayla.
The family had been trying to return to Orange County, Calif., but had several Delta Air Lines flights canceled before finding a United flight, which Arteaga said the airline offered for free.
“No A/C, no nothing, we’re just sweating in here. They don’t even give us water,” he said. “None of this is right.”
Airlines began commercial flights out of San Juan on Sunday, starting with just two flights a day per airline.
The storm knocked out the control tower’s radar system, forcing pilots to fly to the island using “visual confirmation,” a trickier method that takes longer for planes to land and takeoff, said Elvis Perez, a service clerk for American Airlines.
About 300 airline employees were flown in from Miami to assist in everything from baggage handling to ticketing, he said. But with the computer system still down, reservations had to be confirmed with phone calls to Miami.
“It’s been tough,” Perez said.
not clear the exact number of people who would be uninsured because it was difficult to estimate how states would react.
If passed, the legislation would have kept most Obamacare taxes in place but sent the money back to the states in the form of block grants to design their own health systems, waiving Obamacare’s minimum insurance requirements. It also would have ended the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility and temporarily replaced that money with block grants through 2026.
The bill would also overhaul the traditional Medicaid program and replace it with a per-capita grant program. Collins said the bill’s changes to Medicaid would “have a devastating impact.”
Collins also said she had issues with the Graham-Cassidy waiver system, which she said would “weaken protections for people with pre-existing conditions.”
“The CBO’s analysis on the earlier version of the bill, incomplete though it is due to time constraints, confirms that this bill will have a substantially negative impact on the number of people covered by insurance,” Collins said in a statement.
Collins said she had no confidence that the new version of the bill released over the weekend would improve the legislation or dampen its negative impact on Maine. “This is simply not the way that we should be approaching an important and complex issue that must be handled thoughtfully and fairly for all Americans,” she said.
The CBO also estimated “disruptions and other implementa- tion problems would accompany the transition” because of the short time frame states would have to set up their health systems. Collins said she had been lobbied by President Trump, Vice President Pence and others.
“It would probably be a shorter list of who hasn’t called me on this bill,” she told reporters.
The Maine senator is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which had been working on a bipartisan approach to stabilize the individual health insurance market until last week, when Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said he was unable to come to a compromise with the committee’s top Democrat.
Collins told reporters Monday night she was encouraged by the bipartisan process on the Senate HELP Committee. She said the focus should be on fixing Obamacare rather than replacing it.
Her announcement followed a Finance Committee hearing on the legislation that took up much of the afternoon — including a brief delay caused by protesters, many in wheelchairs, chanting their opposition to Medicaid cuts.
The hearing had been an attempt to appease lawmakers critical of the lack of regular order that had gone on with the bill, but following weekend announcements of opposition by key senators, it seemed like merely a formality.
During a recess, Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was asked what chance the bill has of passing. “Zero,” he replied. “I don’t think it has much chance. The Democrats aren’t going to support it. They’re too interested in demagoguing it.”