Friday, the National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg posted a must-read piece on “Obamacare’s Ticking Clock” that articulates the real Obamacare narrative the mainstream media desperately wants to ignore. The story is not really the “third world” website per se, it’s how that hot mess impacts enrollment numbers and demographics. The longer the site stumbles, the more pressure to delay the individual mandate, Obamacare’s only means of survival.

As Goldberg argues, the clock is ticking on the Obamacare “tech surge” as pressure mounts from both sides for an individual mandate delay:

Still, the barely holding conventional wisdom on the right and left is that the website will get fixed eventually, the glitches will be de-glitched, and one day we’ll all look back and laugh at the fuss. That’s possible. But with every passing day it’s less likely. And if more Democrats join the movement to delay the individual mandate (Republican senator Marco Rubio has already drafted legislation to do exactly that), the whole thing could start to unravel almost overnight.

Obama’s Rose Garden sales pitch emphasized that Obamacare is more than Healthcare.gov. Right, but as Goldberg points out, the ramifications of the website’s failures impact more than just public perception of the program’s online interface. Goldberg’s analogy: the website rollout is like “watching a rival football team face-plant on the way out of the locker room.”

Obamacare will have to forfeit the game if it cannot amass enough young and healthy customers, most of whom are not willing to put up the “North Korean-level customer service” of the program. The only way to “attract” these young, healthy customers is by coercion, i.e., the individual mandate. For this reason, Goldberg argues the insurance companies “cannot survive without the individual mandate”:

That’s because insurance companies cannot survive Obamacare without the individual mandate. Under the law, they must offer insurance to anyone who needs it — often at an artificially low price at that. The only way they can make a profit is if the government upholds its promise to get millions of young, healthy people to sign up for more expensive insurance than they need. Take away the mandate — i.e., the penalty — and you make that virtually impossible. If the government tells insurance companies they still have to provide insurance to bad risks, it will be like the government telling Apple it has to sell iPhones at a loss. The insurance companies will sue. And as Dan McLaughlin of The Federalist notes, their lawyers will invoke the Obama administration’s arguments before the Supreme Court that the mandate was inseparable from the “must-issue” requirements under the law.

With the clocking ticking on the “glitch” fix, the individual mandate is increasingly in danger of delay. And with every potential young and healthy enrollee the hapless Healthcare.gov fails to attract, the Republicans who called for delay look “just a little bit more reasonable.”