Driving home from Woonsocket, this evening, I heard Karl Wadensten (president of VIBCO and board member for Rhode Island’s Economic Development Corp.) on Matt Allen’s 630 WPRO show saying that the state’s ObamaCare exchange, HealthSourceRI, has done a pretty good job getting rolling.

Compared with the absolute disaster that is the federal Web site, I suppose the point is irrefutable, but a few considerations shouldn’t be forgotten, not the least because they shed light on the broader problems that Rhode Island has created for itself:

1. Rhode Island has driven all but three insurers out of the state, so we’re not talking about a huge job pulling together pricing for the handful of options that the state government has left for us.
2. Rhode Island already led the nation in mandates on insurance, so there was relatively little for the federal government to force us to change, meaning that “the sticker shock” was bound to be less… because we were already paying more than we should have been.
3. Rhode Island received $84 million to set up and get rolling a Web site to serve its population of one million people.  Obama-style transparency leaves the question of cost of the federal exchange unanswerable, but $400 million is a reasonable estimate, and it serves more than half of all U.S. states.

It seems to me that proclaiming the Ocean State’s relative success at stepping farther into government control of healthcare is a bit like acknowledging that it’s easier to walk over people when you’ve already knocked them down.