The Affordable Care Act gave states the option of creating their own online health-insurance exchanges or defaulting to a federal site to help uninsured Americans obtain coverage before the law?s individual mandate kicked in. Generally, the states whose political leaders opposed the health-care legislation refused to develop their own exchanges, leaving uninsured residents to seek coverage on the federal site. With some well-documented technical problems plaguing the federal exchange, those resistant states are now faring worse on average than their compliant counterparts in terms of enrollment numbers.
