Remember when elections settled things? OK, I don’t either. But there’s more than the usual clutter of unresolved issues on the agenda this year.

The Los Angeles Times has a nice roundup of the states of health care, as more Republican governors opt not to set up the state exchanges prescribed by the Affordable Care Act. Our state decided early to set up an exchange.

States that plan to run their own exchanges are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. All but four have Democratic governors. Several other states, including Illinois, are planning to operate theirs in partnership with the federal government.

Those deferring completely to the federal government are Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. All but one have GOP governors.

In the Wall Street Journal, James Capretta and Yuval Levin explain the importance of the exchanges and the states’ recalcitrance to successful implementation of the ACA.

By declining to build exchanges, the states would pass the burden and costs of the exchanges to the administration that sought this law. And it is far from clear that the administration could operate the exchanges on its own.

Congress didn’t allocate money for administering federal exchanges, and the law as written seems to prohibit federally run exchanges from providing subsidies to individuals. The administration insists that it can provide those subsidies anyway. But if the courts read the plain words of the statute, then federal exchanges couldn’t really function.

Thus states that refuse to create their own exchanges would effectively be repealing a large part of the law…

More on this at Politico,

Meanwhile, the fiscal cliff, which seemingly couldn’t be addressed during the campaign, continues to affect investment decisions. The WSJ headline sums it up: Investment Falls Off a Cliff. With state revenue growth still slow, failures in D.C. could plunge many state capitals even deeper into red ink.

More parochially, in another example of post-electoral indecisiveness, Georgia and Washington – the two states that overcame teachers’ union opposition to pass charter schools – face possible legal roadblocks. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports wrangling over the appoints to the new Georgia Charter School Commission. And the Wall Street Journal says charter opponents are planning to sue.

Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn is also considering a lawsuit.

Looks like we’re going to be in limbo a little longer.