And so Monday’s news appears to fit into a well-established Obamacare pattern. When the administration was getting close to fixing the HealthCare.gov website in late November, a top administration official disclosed to Congress that — oops — as much as 40 percent of the website’s IT systems weren’t even built yet.

And when Obama announced his administrative fix for the canceled plans — letting insurers voluntarily extend people’s old, pre-Obamacare plans for another year — about half the states said they’d go along. But nearly half the states didn’t, so that problem wasn’t really fixed.

That’s why the administration announced last week that people who might fall through the cracks of that fix, and haven’t been able to replace their old plans in other ways, can sign up for slimmed-down “catastrophic” health plans as another option.

Other deadlines keep moving too. People were supposed to sign up by Dec. 15 if they wanted their Obamacare coverage to start on Jan. 1, but in late November, the administration moved that deadline back a week. And by mid-December, the administration was even softening that deadline. Instead, people could pay their premiums as late as Dec. 31, and leaned on insurers to volunteer to give them even more time.