The Obama Administration is focused like a laser on implementing the new health care law. TIME magazine reports that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough spends two hours a day on it and senior aides are working on the issue nearly full time. They’re scrambling right now because there’s a key October 1 deadline to launch the exchanges, the marketplaces required by ObamaCare. These are expected to provide federally subsidized health care for 7 million people next year. If all goes as planned, by 2016, they’re supposed to cover 22 million people.

But that’s a big ‘if.’ First of all, there’s supposed to be an exchange in each state. Under ObamaCare, states have the choice whether to set up their own, or let the federal government do it.  Only 16 states are setting up their own exchanges, far fewer than the Feds expected. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to be running the remaining 34, but frustratingly little information is available about them, even to the officials who are supposed to be auditing progress. The uncertainty is tough on businesses. The implementation of ObamaCare is looking like what the Wall Street Journal calls a “black-ops mission.”

What must worry the White House is that that ObamaCare is increasingly unpopular.  Forty-nine percent of Americans, according to a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, think it’s a bad idea.  This particularly affects the exchanges which, in order to succeed, need roughly 2.7 million healthy young adults to enroll. ObamaCare was sold with the promise that no one would be refused coverage. All pre-existing conditions must be covered. In order to make the numbers work for older, less healthy Americans, there will have to be enough young enrollees.

The trick is to convince healthy people, ages 18-35 to pay the new premiums, up 50 to 150 percent, even if there’s a subsidy involved. This is where the pre-existing conditions coverage mandate comes back around to bite the system. Why would young healthy and heady young people sign up for expensive insurance when they can always go uninsured and wait to get insurance until they need it?

This is another redistributive wealth transfer program set up to feed off of young, healthy people — many of whom are trying to launch careers in in a very tough entry-level job market — to pay for the generous healthcare of older, sicker people.

The cost of the program is worrisome. So is the cost of implementation. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has famously been out soliciting donations from the health care industry she regulates to supplement the insufficient implementation budget. They’re needing lots more money than expected to do the PR to sell people on participating. California got nearly a billion dollars to set up exchanges and nearly half of that is slated for “outreach.” “Outreach?” If this law was so beneficial, people would be clamoring to participate.