Obamacare's buggy implementation

The fact that these critical systems haven't been built—months after the launch of the exchanges and with just weeks to go until insurers need to start being paid—makes it clear that the implementation effort still lags far behind. And if the rollout of portions that remain incomplete resembles the rollout so far, that means there are lots of new problems still to come.

But it’s not just that there’s a lot of work still to do. The insurer payment workaround also highlights how much of Obamacare's buggy implementation is still being managed on a temporary, ad hoc basis. The administration is flying a broken vessel without a flight plan.

Significant delays started early this year, when the administration decided to hold off on implementing the single most critical part of the small-business exchange system. Then, in mid-summer, reporting requirements for employers, along with the employer mandate and income verification requirements, were delayed too. Since the launch of the law, we've seen further delays in the Spanish language website, Medicaid data transfer systems that are necessary to facilitate coverage, and the federal small-business exchange, which has now been completely delayed by a year. Last month, the White House proposed an administrative tweak in response to public anger over a wave of plan cancellations, one that, if it has a significant effect, could further undermine the health law's enrollment scheme.

The legal authority to implement many of these changes is dubious, but the administration seems more concerned with charging ahead than with accounting for legal niceties. As with the insurer payment tweak, if need be, they'll sort it all out later.

These aren’t the signs of an administration that is prepared to effectively handle the rollout of the largest and most complicated domestic policy in a generation; quite the opposite. They’re the signs of an administration that is struggling keep its signature initiative afloat, somehow. They’re just making it as they go along, and hoping that eventually it all works out.

Will this latest workaround buy the administration some time? Perhaps. Insurers seem to prefer it to the alternative of not getting paid. But buying time is about all it will do.

It's also worth remembering what happened the last time Obama pointed people frustrated with the online system toward a manual alternative: It turned out that the call centers and the pen-and-paper enrollments he said could help move people through the enrollment process were dependent on the same broken web system that was causing all the problems in the first. It was a workaround that didn't work. Ultimately, what the long list of tweaks, delays, and temporary patches to the law suggest is that, as passed, written, and envisioned by its Democratic authors, the law itself doesn’t work either.