Barack Obama

The shared interest in making the new health care law work was clear to anybody watching or listening to the press conference on Thursday. Lee spoke about the day as a “historic” occasion, likening it to the launching of Medicare, when government made insurance available to millions of people who couldn’t get it before. Health care industry officials made similar statements, boasting of their collaboration with politicians and describing universal coverage as a “moral imperative.”

Unfortunately, millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans live in places like Florida and Texas, where there is far less sympathy—and a great deal more hostility—to the idea of Obamacare. It’s entirely possible that the insurance bids in those states will be a lot higher, precisely because state officials there are doing nothing to help and quite a bit to hurt implementation. But if that happens, blame won’t belong with the heath care law or the federal officials in charge of its management. It will belong with the state officials who can’t, or won’t, deliver to their constituents the benefits that California’s officials appear to be providing theirs.