The rules of Obamacare — indeed, the language of the law itself — have all the permanence of pencil. As of this editorial’s completion on Christmas Eve, members of the Obama administration were scavenging desk drawers for erasers that hadn’t been rubbed to a nub.

After nearly four years of defending the Affordable Care Actas the “law of the land,” the White House has spent the past three months revising and rewriting the federal government’s forced overhaul of American health insurance. And the closer the calendar gets to Obamacare’s full implementation on Jan. 1, the faster the administration scrambles to fix its most urgent flaws. The more it changes, the more it fails, the more it changes.

It would not be at all surprising to see the president carry out another cynical Obamacare news dump, or even a few more, in the run-up to New Year’s Day. It would not be surprising to see the deadline for purchasing coverage through federal-state exchanges extended into January, whether it’s because of new website problems or political pressures resulting from missedenrollment targets. This law is so bad, the only certainties are more chaos and more public unhappiness.