The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has scared many state’s legislators into starting the process of setting up health insurance exchanges by saying that if the states fail to do so the federal government will step in and set up exchanges on the state’s dime.

However, this week a small kink in the federal law came to light. It seems that while ObamaCare does give DHHS the authority to create a federal health insurance exchange for states that do not set up their own in accordance to the ObamaCare law, it failed to allocate the funding to actually set the exchanges up.

Strange that this was left out given how much funding was set aside to assist states in creating their own health insurance exchanges. This misstep is starting to get some traction, but it may be too little too late for those states who jumped the gun due to being scared of the federal DHHS set up.