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. Within my travels, I often heard, "We understand what all of those other country thinks of us." It might become a reason for pride, then, that in 2007, Mississippi was leading a race it wished to win. That fall, a complete year before Obama's election towards the White House put national health care reform on the agenda, the governor, Haley Slim Xtreme Reviews Barbour, called up the newly elected state insurance commissioner Mike Chaney, a Vietnam veteran from Vicksburg. The 2 Republicans had been friends since college; Chaney had been the push chairman for Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Mississippi State University when Barbour pledged the fraternity. Now, the governor had an assignment for his old friend.

"He said, 'Chaney, I really want you to get involved in something that the Heritage Foundation had talked about,'" Chaney, 70, recalled when I spoke to him at his Jackson office in June. Barbour, a folksy titan who'd returned to rule over Mississippi politics following a successful career as a Washington super lobbyist and national Republican Party chairman, had enraged advocates for the poor with a series of stringent new restrictions on Medicaid. Now he was keen to consider the conservative think tank's suggestions to aid one part of those without health insurance: "The largest group of the uninsured in Mississippi after i was governor were the workers of small businesses," Barbour told me. He tasked Chaney with laying out how Mississippi could setup an online marketplace in which the state's many small businesses could pool their purchasing capacity to look for medical coverage.

The concept, at the time, was seen as an conservative one. It was area of the health reform law Republican Gov. Mitt Romney had signed in Massachusetts in the year 2006, and Barbour was touting it as being a fiscal development measure. "I went from not liking it, to actually love it," Chaney told me. "You know, like you didn't such as the girl within the third grade and you ended up marrying her?"

By 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, planning was well underway for a state-based exchange in Mississippi. "We didn't have elected officials who have been against what we used to do," Chaney insists today.

As Chaney pushed ahead--hiring technology vendors, convening committees and holding town hall meetings--he expected minimal interference. In December 2010, more than 100 elected officials, agency heads, business leaders and health insurers had attended a "Stakeholders Summit." Six months later, Barbour wrote a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, Obama's secretary of Health insurance and Human Services, designating Chaney and also the Mississippi Insurance Department because the "proper authority" to apply for federal ACA funding to build the exchange. Barbour, a pragmatic dealmaker, made clear his interest came "before President barack obama took office and much earlier than Obamacare was enacted," and that his plan would meet "the needs of Mississippi, not what is right for Washington."

Chaney moved ahead swiftly. Over the summer of 2011, with $21 million in federal grants, he hired the firm Getinsured.com to build the state's site--christened "OneMississippi.com"--and held weekly meetings with his team, whom he had expected to read Landmark, the Washington Post's help guide to the law. ("We bought 20 copies," Chaney told me, holding the book in his office. "It's a great read.") Blue Cross Blue Shield, which had greater than 80 % from the insurance market in Mississippi, assured Chaney it had been in. The Center for Mississippi Health Policy, a non-partisan research group, estimated that 1 in 10 nonelderly residents could be permitted to buy coverage through the exchange and that 230,000 low-income Slim Xtreme Blue Mississippians could receive federal tax credits, totaling $900 million a year, to assist them to purchase insurance around the exchange.

At the end of that summer, OneMississippi.com billboards went up over the state at football stadiums--the town squares of Mississippi. "Your One Stop Health Choice," the ads read, next to an image of Chaney's smiling face. Chaney anticipated federal regulators would approve the site by the end of the entire year. The web site was ready. Mississippi would get something right for a big change.