The ACA has turned out to be the outrageous disaster that many Republicans predicted it would be (at least publicly), so the Obama administration is basically -- with no authority at all -- stripping the original law of one provision after another. But nobody is going to complain about it because this is basically the equivalent of an innocent man being convicted unjustly in a court of law ... without a judge ever enforcing the sentence.
There's the rub. The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it to the letter. At the same time, real people are getting really hurt by this, and delaying any relief is immoral and probably politically unwise.
It's a really tough balancing act from a political sense - trying to force the rogue administration into following the law and Constitutional process while simultaneously doing anything possible to avert this train wreck.
Insurers have to set premiums for 2015 sometime in the next couple of months, as I understand it. It makes it pretty difficult to calculate those when you haven't a clue what your final risk pool will be. Guesswork, I guess, and they'll err on the high side to protect themselves.
These delays are also indicative that the enrollment numbers are paltry - not nearly high enough to make it work.
Obama is rolling back his own bill little by little and what he's not rolling back is going to collapse.