Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the Patient “Protection” and “Affordable” Care Act does say that states could decline to take up ObamaCare’s administrative burdens if they so chose, and that the federal government would then step in and handle it for them, right? Are they just mad that states didn’t fall in line according to their wildly optimistic calculations, or did the Obama administration suddenly decide to arbitrarily and unilaterally change that rule, too? Via Bloomberg:

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health & Human Services, said the Affordable Care Act will succeed in states run by Democrats who have embraced the law. In states such as Georgia where the governor and legislature are in Republican hands, “the job is made doubly difficult,” Sebelius said in an interview today during a visit to Atlanta to meet with supporters of the law. …

The comment further drives a wedge between the Obama administration and Republicans who have opposed the 2010 health-care system overhaul and continue to undermine next year’s core implementation. Republicans in Indiana, Ohio, Georgia and Florida have said people who buy insurance for themselves face huge premium increases — as much as triple in Georgia, the state’s insurance commissioner, Ralph Hudgens, said on July 30.

“We know that there will be states where things will go very well because the states are all in,” Sebelius said. For residents in other states, “getting correct facts to them, drilling down through the misinformation, is going to be more complicated. That’s where a lot of my time and effort is going to be spent, on the markets that are really federal markets.”

Drilling through the “misinformation”? Er… really? Is that really the turn of the screw upon which the fate of ObamaCare depends? It couldn’t be that ObamaCare consistently resembles — oh, I don’t know — an overly ambitious, fundamentally flawed, economically harmful, and generally poorly planned raging monster of a legislative package tripping over its own shortcomings, could it?

And is it just me, or is that kind of a bold-faced thing to say a matter of hours after the administration announced that they were arbitrarily delaying the caps on out-of-pocket costs for consumers that are kind of a major component in that whole “affordable” part of the ACA? There have been plenty of problems coming out of enthusiastic blue states about getting insurance companies to comply with the arbitrarily determined caps, but never mind — it’s always going to be those stubborn red states’ fault, natch.