I don't follow Marco Rubio on Twitter. Full disclosure: I follow very few people on Twitter. But, occasionally I see a Twitter post that seems so self-serving that it makes me want to know more.
Marco Rubio's July 12, 2017 tweet on how he was doing right by Floridians by working on amendments to the BCRA that would add flexibility to Medicaid caps in the case of a public health emergency such as Zika caught my eye. These different versions of the BCRA are coming so fast that it is understandable that much analysis takes things at face value but I have to disagree that the recently added BCRA language that adds a five year window capped fund for retroactively granted per capita cap relief for certain declared public health emergencies if they are both declared on the state level and recognized as such on the federal level is going to help Florida one bit with the kind of massive public health emergency something like Zika could bring.
Actually, Sara Rosenbaum has taken a careful look at the public health emergency exemption language and it is all too clear that it is a particularly bad fit for the kind of public health emergency manifested by Zika. It is the tail of the expense of Zika exposure that is the real expense, anyway, and though disabled children may receive some favorable Medicaid treatment under this latest version of BCRA there is little evidence that five years of authorization for Florida to advance fund extra efforts in Zika transmission suppression will do a great deal to actually suppress Zika.
Floridians should be nervous about this, given past experience with the politics of shaking federal funds lose to combat Zika's spread in their state.
Missouri State of Mind 