On Wednesday, the Orlando Weekly published the explosive and infuriating story of Charlene Dill, a struggling, 32-year-old mother of three who collapsed and died on a stranger's floor late last month. According to Weekly reporter Billy Manes, Dill suffered from a treatable heart condition. She also fell into what policy experts call the Medicaid coverage gap—a hole the Supreme Court punctured in the health safety net when seven of its justices rendered the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion entirely voluntary.

Over 20 Republican state governments have ripped that hole wide open by refusing billions of federal dollars, offered on the sole condition that they be used to insure residents who earn less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level. In their states, residents who weren't previously eligible for Medicaid, but currently earn too little to qualify for subsidies to purchase private insurance, are out of luck. Experts estimate that five million people nationwide have fallen into the gap. Nearly a million of those people reside in Florida alone—collateral damage in the GOP's war against Obamacare. Dill was one of those people. She was selling a vacuum cleaner to earn the money she needed to buy her heart medication when she collapsed.

The Weekly article trafficked fairly well, and Dill's actual story went incredibly viral, thanks to the liberal website Think Progress, whose post about the Weekly piece—"This 32-Year-Old Florida Woman Is Dead Because Her State Refused To Expand Medicaid"—has been shared over 62,000 times on Facebook.

Five days later, it has practically vanished from the national Obamacare debate. Hundreds of thousands of people now know Dill's story, but the liberal media isn't really making an issue of it, Democrats outside of Florida have been unusually reticent about it, too, and the Florida legislature remains unwilling to expand its Medicaid program, despite the brief surge of bad publicity.

That cautiousness simultaneously reflects the left's greatest political strength and weakness: its relatively healthy epistemological standards, and its at-times lamentable unwillingness to seize its own political advantage.