What's next in health-care follies?

Day by day, the tale of health-care reform in America seems to become curiouser and curiouser. Indeed, one setback after another has befallen the Affordable Care Act since it was rolled out on Oct. 1.

First there was the disastrous open-enrollment launch that has been vexed by abominable website difficulties.

The grim results of that fiasco were announced this week: a total of 106,000 Americans signing up for health insurance under the new health system — barely one-fifth of what was expected.

In some places, signup numbers were just laughable: 212, for instance, in Montana.

On top of that came the cancellation crisis, when insurance companies ended coverage for an estimated 4.2 million people who had what under new federal health guidelines are deemed to be substandard insurance policies.

As a result, we have even more people in need of a health-insurance system that only a lucky few have been able to access reliably.

President Obama on Thursday decreed that insurance companies would be permitted to continue to sell to existing customers those individual coverage plans that would be rated as substandard under the health-care law.

The Los Angeles Times called this “a desperate attempt to fulfill a promise President Obama never should have made,” and we tend to agree.

The U.S. House on Friday went one step further, voting to give insurance firms the ability to sell individual plans to new as well as existing customers, even if the coverage falls short of the law’s requirements.

The problem with either of these options is that insurance companies may not be able to reverse course easily or without jacking up premiums — and state insurance commissioners may not be able to get around their own Obamacare-related restrictions.

In Montana, for example, the state insurance commissioner says state law doesn’t allow her to intervene to help the 26,000 Montanans whose insurance was withdrawn.

While we sympathize with the millions of our neighbors who, through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised by the cold calculus of the health-care law, we wonder if the desperation damage-control efforts in Washington, D.C., will really help right the sinking ship of health-insurance reform.

Policy-makers should perhaps be seeking other ways to help those with canceled policies find insurance coverage before the end-of-the-year deadline. One possibility that has been broached is allowing the insurance-less special access to Medicare benefits on a short-term basis.

In any case, some other avenues to help these people need to be pursued since the current prescriptions offered by Congress and the administration seem to point toward another partisan clash and, inevitably, no resolution.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.