The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

The [federal health care] exchange was supposed to be functional at the beginning of October. The administration now promises it will be by the end of November. {Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen} Sebelius’s assurances strained the credulity even of Chairman Max Baucus, who cast the deciding vote to pass ObamaCare in December 2009. “It has been disappointing to hear members of the administration say they didn’t see problems coming,” Baucus told Sebelius today. “We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.” In April Baucus famously told Sebelius “he saw ‘a huge train wreck coming down,’ ” a statement that proved to be an outrageous slander against train wrecks.

The administration’s decision to cut itself two months’ slack raises two questions: Can it keep the new promise, and what happens in December?

There is every reason to doubt the exchange can be made functional in the next 24 days. One reason is that much of the coverage and commentary tends to minimize the seriousness of the challenge by describing the nonfunctional system as a “website.” What’s not working isn’t just the website–the online user interface–but the complicated system that lies behind it. To say HHS needs to fix the “website” is like saying your car needs repairs to its steering wheel and accelerator when in fact the whole engine is junk.

An expert assessment comes from Robert Charette, a technology risk-management consultant, in an interview with Willie Jones of IEEE Spectrum (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers):

Jones: Last week, . . . Sebelius assured her inquisitors at a congressional hearing that her department has brought in experts that have a handle on the problems the site is facing. How confident should we be in Sebelius’ assurances?

Charette: Not very. They’re talking about dozens and dozens of items on their punch list—both in terms of functionality and performance issues. They’ve got just over 30 days to get through the list. Let’s just say that there are 30 items on it. What do you think is the actual probability of getting through testing them, making sure that the system works end to end and that there are no security holes all in a single month? How do you expect to get that done, knowing that every time you make a fix, there’s a high probability that you’re going to introduce an error somewhere else?

Jones: Let’s spin this forward a bit. How do you think this next month will actually go?

Charette: They said that they needed five weeks at the minimum to test it, and they’re still making all these changes. Where will that five-week window fit? If they had stopped right then and tested it for five weeks, they wouldn’t have been able to finish on time. And five weeks was probably the absolute minimum they needed, assuming everything worked. They’re patching the system as they go along and as Sebelius admitted, they’re doing very local unit tests (which, by the way, is what got them into this mess in the first place, with each contractor saying, “Well, my stuff works”). If they discover something major, they may have to run the whole system test again.

Jones: So they’ll most likely gain functionality, but security is not a given.

Charette: Yes, unfortunately. It would be very surprising if there isn’t some type of breach, either at the federal or state level, by this time next year.

That, Charette explains, means that if you find yourself uninsured, you’ll need “to do a personal risk assessment,” balancing the possibility of identity theft against the cost of buying unsubsidized insurance or doing without, paying the mandate tax, and hoping you avoid illness or injury in 2014.

One immediate consequence of ObamaCare has been to multiply the ranks of the imminently uninsured. In addition to most of those who do not have insurance now, they include the millions of victims of the most massive consumer fraud in American history, Barack Obama’s fraudulent promise that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it.” For them, time is running out.

Most of the discussion of ObamaCare deadlines has focused on the deadline for avoiding the mandate tax. The 2014 ObamaCare open enrollment period doesn’t end until March 31, and the mandate tax kicks in only if a taxpayer goes uninsured for three months. But as the Christian Science Monitor explained last month, that made the actual deadline a month and a half earlier:

Most companies start their policies on the first of the month, and so to be covered on March 31, one has to buy insurance that starts on March 1. To get insurance that starts on March 1, one has to sign up by around Feb. 15.

The Obama administration has since extended that deadline, waiving the mandate tax for anyone who signs up for insurance by the end of March, even if that means going without coverage for three or four months.

But wait. If you have to sign up for insurance half a month before your policy becomes effective, then the deadline for an ObamaCare fraud victim whose current policy ends Dec. 31 to avoid a lapse in coverage is around Dec. 15. Even in the unlikely event that HHS fulfills the promise to get the federal exchange working by then, some ObamaCare fraud victims will have barely two weeks to purchase insurance.

In the likely event that Sebelius’s Nov. 30 pledge turns out to be just another vaporware promise, the number of uninsured Americans will start rising on Jan. 1 as the fraud victims’ policies begin to expire. Assessment of the mandate tax against those people–and against those who are currently uninsured and unable to comply with the mandate because of the administration’s technical incompetence–would be difficult to justify either politically or legally.

But we are fast approaching the point where the question of the mandate is a tangential one. Among those who are left without coverage by the ObamaCare fraud and debacle, some will become seriously ill or injured, and others will be unable to get care for pre-existing conditions. At that point ObamaCare will be not just a technical, political and economic disaster but a humanitarian one as well.

So the choice for the uninsured is:

1. Sign on to ObamaCare and risk identity theft.
2. Don’t sign on and risk (A) the penalty and (B) being uninsured if you have health problems next year.

If you predict that ObamaCare will be “not just a technical, political and economic disaster but a humanitarian one as well,” you will be correct.In fact, you are correct, based on this from Fox News’ Kelly Report:

It’s as if the Obama administration wants ObamaCare to fail. To, say, replace it with a single-payer system.

Charles C.W. Cooke addresses both ObamaCare and single-payer:

The underlying conceit here, that the Democratic party had the option of “sticking to the original vision” of single-payer but that it instead settled on Obamacare as part of some sort of grand compromise, is fairly popular among the law’s apologists these days. Republicans, this story goes, are opportunistic hypocrites who dropped their longtime support for a system that looked just like Obamacare the very moment that a black man was elected to the White House. Democrats, meanwhile, are presented as being too nice and too solicitous of their opponents, and criticized for having elected to placate the Republican party by forgoing pursuit of what they truly wanted: Medicare for all.

Reassuring as this tale might be to those who are worriedly surveying the damage that Healthcare.gov has wrought upon their project, it remains self-evidently absurd. Obamacare was passed into law without a single Republican vote; its passage led to the biggest midterm blowout since 1948; and repealing the measure has been, to borrow Harry Reid’s favorite word, the “obsession” of Republicans for nearly five years. It is a law based upon an idea that Republican leadership failed to consider, debate, or advance during any of the periods in which they have held political power — and one that they actively opposed when it was suggested in a similar form by President Clinton during the 1990s. If Republicans were desperate to get something done along the lines that Obama proposed in 2009, they have had a funny way of showing it over the past 159 years. …

[Robert] Reich’s fantasy account of a restrained Democratic party does not hold up either. There is a devastatingly dull reason the bulletproof Democratic majority of 2008 didn’t build “comprehensive health insurance on Social Security and Medicare,” and that is that it didn’t have the votes. Indeed, with full control of the government, Democrats didn’t even have the votes to set up a public insurance option, let alone to take over the whole system. Long before Scott Brown was elected to the Senate, Ezra Klein was lamenting that the public option was dead on arrival. Joe Lieberman, Klein noted sadly, has “swung the axe and cut his deal cleanly, killing not only the public option, but anything that looked even remotely like it.”

Lieberman did this for a solid reason: Despite the best efforts of the president, the mooted health-care bill remained deeply unpopular throughout the legislative process, and the public option even more so. Americans, remember, didn’t even want the bill as it currently ended up, and they were so determined to stop it that the progressive stronghold of Massachusetts elected to the Senate a Republican who ran promising not only to “kill” that specific bill but also to end the Democratic party’s filibuster-proof majority. Are we honestly expected to suppose that if the proposal had been farther to the left, it would have had a better chance? Does the progressive movement really think that the public can be persuaded that Democratic legislators “compromised” with an intransigent opposition out of the goodness of their hearts? I think not.

As for Reich’s claim that a single-payer system would have been “more widely accepted by the public”: Is he joking? So acutely aware were the president and his allies in Congress of the fact that the vast majority of Americans did not want to lose their current insurance that, like so many traveling salesmen on the frontier, they just brazenly lied, promising things of their product that it could never possibly deliver and assiduously playing down the scale of the chance that their customers were taking. Again, with Obamacare as it is now, the president was forced onto the defensive, provoked into repeating as mantra that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” and into reassuring voters that “no one will take it away — no matter what.” One can only imagine what he would have had to promise if he had been peddling single-payer.

I don’t know what worse Obama could have said to sell single-payer. After all, he claimed that if you like your health insurance you can keep it, which is what people call a “lie.”