On June 25, RoseAnn DeMoro, leader of the union National Nurses United, tweeted an image of the grizzly bear on California’s state flag with a knife sticking out of its back. The words “Healthy California” are written on the bottom, and the name “Rendon” is on the knife. It has been retweeted more than 1,000 times, a reflection of the anger swirling around the decision two days earlier by Anthony Rendon, the speaker of California’s Assembly, to shelve the nation’s most ambitious proposal to institute single-payer health care.

What happened in California could have widespread repercussions for the national health care debate. At a time when Congress is threatening to deprive millions of people of health insurance, and when progressive activists are urging national Democrats to make a push for single-payer (or Medicare for All), the California experiment shows all the challenges and pitfalls that await a serious attempt to institute government-provided health insurance.

In a state where Democrats have super-majorities in both legislative chambers and a Democratic governor, the conventional wisdom is that if California can’t pass single-payer, it can’t be passed anywhere. In a statement in response to Rendon’s decision, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote, “If the great state of California has the courage to take on the greed of the insurance companies and the drug companies, the rest of the country will follow. The eyes of the country are on California today.”

The story is a little more complicated than that. The bill—SB 562, also known as Healthy California—had already passed in the Senate in June before Rendon unilaterally decided to take it off the table. Now it will lie in committee without any hearings “until further notice.” The nurses associations that are the lead sponsors of the bill called Rendon’s move “a cowardly act, developed in secret without engaging the thousands of Californians who have rallied to enact real health care reform.”

The timing of Rendon’s decision was especially egregious. Only a day earlier, U.S. Senate Republicans had revealed the first draft of their health care reform plan that would take insurance away from 22 million Americans, many of them Californians. This was a time to shore up support for those vulnerable residents of the Golden State, not leave them to the wolves.