All of the reasons employers now have for offering coverage to their employees—significant tax subsidies, recruitment and retention of employees, and increased productivity and decreased absenteeism when employees are healthy—will continue to exist without the mandate penalty.

The employer mandate serves another purpose, of course. It generates funding to help pay for expansions of health insurance. But it’s a more regressive method of financing than taking money from general revenue—and the Congressional Budget Office has assumed employer penalty payments would ramp up slowly anyway. (Its latest projection assumed no significant revenue in 2014, as a matter of fact.) With the delay, it's possible more people will seek insurance in the exchanges, driving up the program's cost at least for next year and possibly after that. But, as I recall, fewer would be taking advantage of the tax exclusion for employer insurance, thereby increasing offsetting revenue. The cumulative effect of these and other shifts is not clear, at least to me. But it will be in the context of a law that, overall, is projected to reduce the deficit by a significant amount. (Sorry for the imprecision on these numbers. I'm out of the country and not in touch with all of my usual sources.)

In short, delaying the employer mandate probably won't do much damage to the law’s basic goals—making health insurance more available and, over time, containing the rise of health care costs. Some, like Josh Barro and Ezra Klein, have gone so far to suggest that, in an ideal world, the employer mandate would just go away. But an important question still lingers. Why did the administration decide to push back the deadline in the first place? A few theories come to mind—and each one has some unsettling implications.

One is that the administration was genuinely worried about some employment effects at the margins—not businesses dropping coverage, as many have speculated, but changing their hiring patterns in the future. Another possibility is that, in response to loud complaints from employers about the filing requirements for the mandate, the administration just backed off. (It always makes me a little nervous when people in power brag that they are "listening to business.") Yet another possibility is that the Treasury Department has too much going on—and that straightening out this provision in time for next year would have been too much, too soon.

None of these explanations signal catastrophe. The kind of information employers have to submit is genuinely difficult to assemble, the process for filing that information has been the subject of great debate, and the ultimate employment effects of the mandate will likely be small, just as most (though not all) economists predict. Truth is, delaying or modifying the employer mandate is exactly the kind of adjustment many experts expected the law would need–and that, in a less polarized environment, would happen through Congress without nearly this much fuss. But that’s one of the big problems with health care reform right now: It’s impossible to make those adjustments. As Klein writes, "the legislative process around the health-care law is completely broken."