Monday the 23rd is the “official” deadline to sign up for health insurance coverage that will begin January 1st.

However, this week had some more “tweaks” by executive fiat to try and mitigate the disaster that is surely coming on January 1st, when people who couldn’t afford insurance and didn’t qualify for subsidies, or those who lost their insurance due to the new regulations, join the ranks of the uninsured.

Earlier in the week, the Obama administration asked the health insurance companies participating in the exchanges to please extend the grace period for subscribers to get their first payment submitted.  In other words, the administration told the insurance companies to just let people have insurance before they actually pay for it, because they promised to, cross their hearts.  The insurance companies announced that there will be a ten day grace period, until January 10th, to submit the first payment for those plans.  And I’m sure that the administration asked really nicely when they went to the insurance companies and got that grace period.  It probably went something like, “You sure have a nice insurance company here… be a shame if you got audited.  Now, about that grace period?”

God help those insurance companies if someone who has signed up for insurance, but hasn’t paid for it, walks into an ER on January 2nd and needs emergency surgery.  I would never deny anyone emergency surgery, but it is going to be a insurance nightmare.

Then the news broke on Thursday that around half a million people who have lost their insurance plans still have not found replacement coverage.  This was the first time that the administration had admitted to this kind of number, and it was obvious that the admission had them panicking.  And it was made especially obvious that there was panic because yesterday, Secretary Sebelius announced that she was going to declare a “hardship exemption” and make bare-bones catastrophic plans available for everyone, not just the under-30 age group that it was intended for.  In other words, those “junk” insurance plans that the administration kept insisting that people only had because that was all they could get, and they were just SO TERRIBLE and people would be SO GLAD to get these new and improved Obamacare-compliant plans… yeah, you can have the junk insurance again.  (No word on if anyone who gets a junk plan will be audited or not.)  Plus, anyone who had their plan canceled was now covered by this “hardship exemption,” which now makes them exempt from the individual mandate.

Or, as the Wall Street Journal so wittily put it, “Obama Repeals Obamacare.”  The entire law hinges on that individual mandate, and having the healthy and the sick lumped into one giant risk pool.  This new emergency rule change has insurance companies crying in their sleep, and the administration admitting that they are in full-blown panic attack mode.

And, because Healthcare.gov is perfectly predictable when it comes to massive amounts of fail, the website went down again… just before President Obama gave his end-of-the-year press conference.  At that same press conference, the president glossed over the problems and the fixes after paying lip service to the terrible roll-out (after all, there’s no way he wanted to rehash that press conference again), and left for his Hawaiian vacation after saying that people would get “accustomed” to Obamacare and the new laws and rules.

It’s hard to get “accustomed” to anything if the rules keep changing every two weeks to head off the latest problem with the newest deadline.

Monday is the final day to sign up… but it’s really not, now, with this new “hardship exemption.”  Plans need to be paid for by January 1st… or 10th, if you can manage it.  There ‘s no penalty until March 31st… who wants to lay odds on that one being as hard and fast a deadline as the others have been?

The president’s “signature legislation” has become one gigantic game of kick-the-can.  Unfortunately, we the people are the ones being repeatedly kicked.