David Koch Credit: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

I’m going to subject myself to a little bit of Pundit Accountability™ and go back to a piece I wrote back in November – the day before the election – arguing that the prospects for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion were pretty good, even if Republicans governors were to have a good election night. “The governors of Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah – Republicans all – are working on plans that would allow their states to accept Medicaid expansion funds,” I wrote, exhibiting a degree of optimism that is largely out of character for me. That optimism, at least as it pertained to those states, derived from my failure to take into account one critical factor: the intractability and general dickishness of Republican-controlled state legislatures and the Koch empire.

In Utah, Republicans in the state legislature are resisting governor Gary Herbert’s plan to accept Medicaid expansion funds, which would cover 146,000 people at a cost to the state of $236 million over five years. Instead, state Republicans are backing a plan that costs slightly less ($203 […]