The “train wreck” that Montana Sen. Max Baucus now famously predicted for implementation of the Affordable Care Act he helped author will apparently be a painful, slow-motion train wreck.

The Obama administration recently decided to delay for a year the so-called employer mandate, a key provision in the massive law requiring large employers to provide health care to their employees. The administration did so despite criticism that picking and choosing whether to implement legislation that contains specific timelines is unconstitutional.

And it’s understandable, from a political point of view, why the employer mandate was delayed.

Up till now, many businesses have been going to extra lengths to reduce employee schedules to less than 30 hours a week so they will not be considered full-time employees under Obamacare. By doing so, they are making sure that they don’t cross a perverse threshold of 50 full-time employees that would subject them to more onerous provisions under the law. That’s right, the law has incentives to avoid creating jobs, and even worse, incentives for reducing work forces below 50 employees in the midst of a stagnant economy with high unemployment.

And it’s not just businesses. State and local governments and institutions of higher learning are resorting to similar tactics.

Stories like these are playing out across the country, and they will continue to do so going into the 2014 elections, and the president and other Democrats know it’s a big, big looming problem.

Disapproval of Obamacare hit an all-time high of 54 percent, with 39 percent of respondents favoring full or partial repeal of the law and just 36 percent saying they want the law intact or expanded, according to a CBS poll released this week.

We’re betting the law will be even less popular as the economic impacts continue to unfold. Delaying the employer mandate will not delay employers from preparing for the day when it will be implemented.

And that’s not all when it comes to this train leaving the tracks.

Starting Oct. 1, Americans are expected to start looking into participating in insurance exchanges that are supposed to be set up (but some observers question whether they can be by that time).

The subsidized exchanges are intended to address what is called the law’s individual mandate — a requirement for everybody to get insurance or else face a fine that will be collected by the IRS. The exchange system is expected to rely heavily on the enrollment of young, healthy people into expensive insurance plans. Many analysts believe that without an adequate number of young, healthy people enrolled to keep down prices for everyone, the exchanges will implode.

Good luck with attracting legions of 20-somethings to buy something they don’t think they need through a highly complicated subsidy process.

But the government is giving it the old college try, recently ramping up Obamacare educational and promotional efforts that include getting non-profit groups and celebrities involved with enlisting exchange participants. Many of these promotional efforts are being paid for through Obamacare grants. One way to look at it is taxpayers are paying to be bombarded with a whole bunch of marketing information about a law that they already don’t like.

Sure, there are provisions in the law that many people do like, such as the ability for parents to keep their children on their insurance until they are 26, or the provision that prevents people from being denied insurance because they have pre-existing medical conditions. But all in all, it was predictable that there would be profound flaws in a 2,000-page law that would let government grip one-sixth of the nation’s economy after being passed with parliamentary trickery and without one single Republican vote.

That degree of opposition alone was a powerful signal that this law has big problems, and now America gets to watch those problems play out.

What’s really sad is that no matter how much we all agree that the law has huge problems, there is no political will to fix it — or to dump it and start over. Gridlock means that we are going to have to live with the consequences of the Affordable Care Act, whether we like it or not.

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