You know the politics of ObamaCare is bad when even President Obama is forced to concede that the rollout is a bloody mess. If only the new “administrative fix” he announced on Thursday did more to help the consumers who are losing their coverage than it does to help Democrats protect their political future.

In a major political reversal, the President announced at a surprise press conference that he is suspending the regulations that he now admits are the reason that millions of health insurance plans have been terminated. Only days ago he was saying these were “substandard plans” sold by “bad-apple insurers.” Some of us have been warning for years about the coming insurance market destruction, but Mr. Obama went ahead anyway even though millions of middle-class folks preferred their coverage to ObamaCare.

Now these mass cancellations are proving to be unpopular, and Democrats are panicking, so Mr. Obama is offering a temporary stay of execution. He is instructing his health regulators to suspend eight complicated rules that all insurance plans had to meet and had caused the market implosion.

There is less reprieve here than Mr. Obama claims. It’s hard to un-cancel insurance. The rules Mr. Obama is repudiating were written in 2010, and insurers have been adapting to them for years. They will now have to scramble to revive the policies they can while throwing all of their actuarial assumptions out the window.

The faux reprieve also lasts for only one year and applies only to anyone who was covered in 2013. The insurers are essentially being asked to agree to accept losses on behalf of a rump group of policy holders in a legacy business that would then turn into a pumpkin in 2015.

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Editorial board member Joe Rago on the President’s effort to placate Americans who have lost their health insurance, versus Republican ideas for reform. Photos: Getty Images

The burden will also now fall on state insurance commissioners to decide if they want to try to reapprove old plans, or something similar to the outlawed products. But even the insurers that want to exercise this option will need to resuscitate plans in a mere six weeks. The first they heard about the President’s “fix” was at the press conference.

Standing up new rates and benefits will be a major logistical undertaking, and at best only a small fraction of the dropped policies will return, mostly in Republican-led states. Liberal insurance commissioners are already saying they are going to stay the ObamaCare course.

Such regulatory rewriting is also probably illegal. The Administration claims it has “enforcement discretion” to suspend the regulations. But like the employer mandate Mr. Obama also delayed for a year, their hard start-dates are defined in the statute—January 1, 2014. The black-letter law of the Affordable Care Act does not say the rules apply whenever they are politically convenient.

The President’s regulatory rewrite looks all the more cynical because it was rolled out a day before a House vote on legislation that would do much more to solve the cancellation problem. Republican Fred Upton’s bill would allow insurers to sell policies to new customers as well as the old. This would increase the odds that the industry would want to sell profitable policies outside of ObamaCare’s exchanges.

But Mr. Obama can’t tolerate that because it would begin to re-establish a viable private insurance market with more consumer choices that competes with his exchanges. Mr. Obama knows that those exchanges can’t succeed if people are allowed to choose a lower-cost, higher-quality alternative.

That’s why even as he feigned concern for the cancellations he also went out of his way on Thursday to trivialize the anxiety and disruption he has caused. “You have an individual market that accounts for about 5% of the population,” Mr. Obama noted, as if 16 million Americans are a trifle. But in the liberal calculus of ObamaCare, these people are the necessary collateral damage of making entitlement history.

The real justification for Thursday’s “fix” is defensive politics. Democrats needed some political cover against the daily headlines about cancelled policies, and even Bill Clinton was telling Mr. Obama to do something. His faux reprieve will now let Democrats shift the blame for cancellations to insurance companies, though all they have been doing is following the Administration’s orders.

All of which fits the familiar ObamaCare script. Democrats jammed the law through Congress on a partisan vote and against public opinion. At every step since, Mr. Obama has refused to compromise or change the law. And even with this tactical retreat, he is merely trying to find a way to relieve the political pressure long enough to avoid having to work with Republicans in Congress on a larger improvement.

Mr. Obama’s gamble is that he and the Democrats can dissemble and shift responsibility long enough to muscle through the “transition” while the website gets fixed and more people can sign up for subsidies. But none of this will change the fundamental ObamaCare problem that Democrats are trying to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy by government fiat.

They are trying to impose on Americans insurance they don’t want, at prices they don’t want to pay, while limiting their choices of doctors and hospitals. This is the reality of modern liberal government.