Obamacare: a law so officially settled, it’s inscribed in solid Play-Doh.

Stephen Green:

I couldn’t help thinking this was the Worst. Week. Yet., staring once again at the slow-motion train wreck known officially as the Affordable Care Act implementation, or less charitably as the ♡bamaCare!!! Follies. So let us look back on the weary week that was, and then take a brief look ahead at the future of the law Officially So Settled It’s Inscribed in Solid Play-Doh.

So to steal a match from Johnny Carson, how bad was it? Well, you might recall a few months back DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz confidently predicting “that Democratic candidates will be able to run on ObamaCare as an advantage leading into the 2014 election” on Candy Crowley’s little-watched CNN Sunday show. You might also recall — and internet pundits get paid the big bucks to draw these parallels — a little IRS scandal which has been brewing for the last couple days few weeks many months. And what’s the Democratic response to said scandal? To screw up their courage and beg, “More?” It’s true, as The Hillreported:

Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races.

They might get away with it, too — but it won’t help put any daylight between themselves and the ♡bamaCare!!! Follies.

But that’s just the most recent political response. How is the law functioning these days? If you read the comments at DailyKos while heavily medicated, you might be under the assumption that ♡bamaCare!!! has given free insurance and care and puppies to six or maybe even seven trillion Americans, who before the law were forced into slavery to toil in underground Republican sugar mines. But the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost looked at the new numbers behind the new numbers, and concluded that the ♡bamaCare!!! enrollment rate had slowed “markedly in January,” Costs adds:

The total enrollment of 3.3 million reported by HHS is an overestimate. At this point, industry insiders estimate that about 20% of people whom HHS claims are enrollees have not paid their premiums. Meanwhile, hard data from a handful of states suggests that the number of non-payees may be larger.

Cost estimates that perhaps just 2.6 million have enrolled, and of those at most 2 million have actually paid up. I could mention here that the administration’s goal is to get 7 million enrolled by the end of March, or that EnrollMavenestimates that ♡bamaCare!!! has forced a bare minimum of 4.7 million off of their insurance — and that would bring the administration’s enrollment needs way up past 12 million…

…but, really, bringing all that up would just be kicking a hurting law while it’s down.

But how about those state exchanges? We small-government types like to believe that state governments, being closer to the people they represent, are generally more in tune with the needs of their residents. And this is true, if by “more in tune” we mean “hiring workers indicted for theft from their employer.” Here’s what’s going on in my home state:

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