President Barack Obama, through his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has decided to delay the open enrollment period for the second year of his Obamacare by a month.  Obama has said, through his Press Secretary Jay Carney, that the delay will give insurance companies more time to evaluate the results of this year’s enrollments and so to adjust their premiums for that second year.

A carefully anonymous “HHS spokesman” also claims

This change is good news for consumers, who will have more time to learn about plans before enrolling and an open enrollment period that’s a week longer[.]

Both of these claims, of course, are nonsense.  Manhattan Institute Fellow Yevgeniy Feyman pointed out Friday

You are delaying open enrollment [in 2014] for one month.  Premiums are submitted in April, so whether you have open enrollment on Oct 1 or Nov 1, those premiums are already set in stone.  People will just be enrolling a month later.

What else is happening then?  Let’s see….  Oh, yeah—mid-term elections, which has become a referendum on Obamacare as the program has its effects on Americans.  The delay puts enrollment, which would have begun in mid-October, some three weeks prior to the mid-terms, into mid-November—after those elections.

With the premiums already determined—some months prior—Obama’s plain hope here is that the American voter will remain ignorant of the costs of the policies they’re stuck with buying or stuck with renewing and that they will have forgotten the costs already inflicted over the current year from the  cancelations of policies that Americans wanted and the policies’ replacement with poorer policies that have higher premiums, higher deductibles, and “coverage” for things that aren’t wanted or needed.

This is Progressives’ politics at their ugliest.  Yes, even worse than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D, NV) pernicious destruction of the Senate filibuster.