Officials took that kind of piecemeal approach of communicating PPACA information to a new level Tuesday by announcing a one-year delay in the effective date of the PPACA employer health mandate coverage provisions through a Treasury-only blog entry.

Not through a press release. Not through an announcement featured on the website of all of the three major PPACA implementing departments — the Treasury Department, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Labor Department.

Not through a notice fed into the Federal Register publication system.

Not even through some kind of accidental, or even pretend accidental, remark made during some kind of in-person event.

But through a blog entry with the uninformative headline, "Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner."

Whether you love PPACA or hate it, I think everyone can agree that simply trying to figure out just what all of the various arms of HHS, the Treasury Department and the Labor Department are doing — or think they're doing — about it has become a maze-scavenger hunt hybrid. 

And knowing what those agencies are doing doesn't necessarily give you much help with understanding what state exchanges, state insurance departments, state health departments, state CO-OP plans, or the U.S. Office of Personnel Management Multi-State Plan Program are doing.

I lost the scavenger hunt race yesterday (the Treasury Department website is generally not a prime source of PPACA beat material), but, usually, the "find the tidbit" system has been great for my article view counts.

On the other hand, the tangled cloud of notices, drafts, regulations, letters, data resources and final versions of guidance does not inspire much confidence that PPACA implementers are actually implementing the law in a way that they understand, let alone in a coherent, fair, transparent way.

Maybe the cloud reflects the reality that members of Congress saddled the Obama administration with a law that's just plain hard to implement.

It seems as if it's time for the administration and state implementers to get into a big room with the federal and state exchange contractors and figure out what they can really do by Oct. 1 or by Jan. 1, 2014, what they have to put off, and what they have to admit is not actually possible to do.

Of course, PPACA opponents want to use the delays as a new opportunity to kill PPACA altogether. Even for people who hate PPACA, I think repealing it or crippling it is a bad idea.

People in the health insurance industry have known that the current version of the U.S. health finance system was in trouble since the health maintenance organization utilization management programs fell apart in the mid-1990s.

Ten or 15 years ago, even the leaders of groups like the National Association of Health Underwriters and the America's Health Insurance Plans were proposing PPACA-exchange-like programs as the solution to the nation's health finance woes. 

One problem is simply that no one knew how well or poorly the programs would really work in a system that included mechanisms for controlling anti-selection risk and related types of risk.

Letting PPACA take effect in some reasonably coherent form — at least in states like California and New York that actually like it — is one way to get information about what definitely will or definitely won't work.

Whatever happens next, let's just hope the administration does a better job of sharing the big developments with us all.