The Obama administration had said repeatedly that the deadline for signing up for Obamacare this year was March 31. Would that be delayed because the rollout was a disaster? “No, sir,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified. Families couldn’t be given the least break from the mandate to buy insurance, said Sebelius’ spokeswoman: “In fact, we don't actually have the statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.”

Kathleen Sebelius testifies before the House in March.

Oops. Enrollment is far under the administration’s goal, with far fewer young and healthy people paying the overpriced rates needed to sustain the system’s subsidies. So on Tuesday the administration delayed the deadline – to “about mid-April,” reported the Washington Post.

Avik Roy in Forbes explains what’s happening:

“It’s yet another improvisation by the administration, designed to get as many people under the Obamacare tent as possible, to ensure that the law is impervious to repeal. But the upshot is that people who haven’t bought insurance, and recently fallen ill, can now buy coverage at the old rate. So while the extension may increase enrollment figures by a few hundred thousand people, it will also ensure that the pool of people signing up is even sicker and older than it would have been otherwise.”

That means rates, already due to skyrocket next year, will go even higher. It also means a deeper problem, Roy writes:

“The delay indicates that the Obama administration knows what we’ve all been concerned about: that while millions of people are signing up for Obamacare-sponsored insurance, the vast majority of those have been people who were previously insured. And if that’s true, the law isn’t helping the people it was meant to help. Two or three weeks, here or there, isn’t going to solve that problem.”

There are better ways to solve it. You can see a few suggestions here.