3. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican, is inching toward accepting expansion, possibly via an Arkansas-like compromise. He says that he’ll have to bring any expansion to the GOP-controlled legislature for approval, a tough bar to pass, but he sure sounds like someone who wants to find a way to make expansion work. I have a particular journalistic interest in this decision – last year, I spent a weekend in the hills of southern Tennessee with dozens of uninsured working poor, nearly all of whom would be covered by the Medicaid expansion, and nearly all of whom had no idea that the law would provide them with coverage. But that was just before the Supreme Court ruling that threw everything into uncertainty, and all of those people are still waiting for coverage, as if the law had never passed in the first place – as if, really, their lack of interest in it was perfectly appropriate, given that it is providing them with zero benefit.

4. The way Republicans are talking about the Medicaid issue is softening slightly. Reports from the Republican Governors Association confab in Arizona last weekend were all about the divisions between the governors who had backed the expansion and those who hadn’t. But what struck me was how relatively mild the language used by the expansion-rejecting governors was. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, whose state has rejected the expansion, said he didn’t think Republicans who had accepted it would necessarily be punished for that by GOP primary voters: “Some people may try to make it an issue, but I think they’re going to find out it’s not the kind of issue they expect it to be,” he said. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, another expansion-rejector, said, “I do think everybody should have health insurance. I just think ACA and Medicaid expansion were the wrong way to solve that problem.” But, “Every governor has to make the best decision for their state, so I’ve never second-guessed or criticized or questioned those governors who made a different decision than I did. Let’s stop thinking about 2016.”

Now, this tone was surely due partly to simple collegial cordiality. But still, some expansion-rejecting governors seemed less willing to bash the Medicaid part of the law than the other half of it, the insurance exchanges where people further up the income ladder are supposed to get coverage, which have been so confounded by technical troubles. There’s irony in this, of course, given that the exchanges are based on the conservative-preferred model of private-sector insurance plans competing for consumers. But it’s not inconceivable that there are other Republicans who, like Kasich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, will find it easier to support expanding coverage for the state’s neediest even as they continue to rail against the law’s mechanism for guaranteeing coverage to those of greater means. That’s just what happened in the recent special election for an open congressional seat in northeastern Louisiana, where Republican Vance McAllister said he opposed “Obamacare” but backed the Medicaid expansion – and won.

5. The realities of the financial fallout of the decision are becoming clearer. Governors and legislators rejecting the expansion have been warned over and over that they are leaving hundreds of millions in federal dollars on the table. But now other numbers are coming to bear as well – states are rejecting expansion are actually being twice, because they are not only leaving that money on the table but also bracing for big cuts in federal funding for hospitals that see an unusually high share of uninsured patients. The law calls for cuts in that funding since the whole idea was that fewer patients would now be uninsured. Already, at least five hospitals have closed in states where Medicaid wasn’t expanded. This gives even more ammunition to the health care industry lobbyists in states urging lawmakers to come around on expansion. Meanwhile, it's becoming more evident just how much expansion-accepting states are benefiting at the expense of taxpayers in expansion-rejecting ones, a fact that politicians in the the latter states, including some Republicans, are sure to latch onto sooner or later.