Mass scraps broken healthcare exchange, asks for $121M more

[Chris0nllyn]

The total cost to implement Obamacare in Massachusetts surpassed a half-billion dollars yesterday, as the Health Connector board agreed to seek an additional $121 million in federal funds to try to rescue the money-hemorrhaging health exchange.

“This is now Massachusetts’ Big Dig I.T. project,” said Joshua Archambault, a health care expert at the Pioneer Institute. “The decision was completely irresponsible to taxpayers, with very little uncertainty we’re going to get the end result that we want.”

Connector officials insisted the exchange is so broken they had no choice.

“The reality is, this is it,” said Sarah Iselin, the state’s Obamacare czar. “When we look at what we can reasonably do for the fall, this is it. I wish we had more choices, but we don’t. We’re making the best of a really lousy situation.”

Federal taxpayers will be asked to shell out the cost of pursuing a “dual track” of simultaneously implementing software to build a new state exchange and joining the federal Healthcare.gov as a fallback plan.

For taxpayers, Obamacare in Massachusetts has been a more-than-half-billion-dollar blunder. It amounts to: $270 million in federal grants to implement the law, an estimated $120 million through the end of the year to keep some Bay Staters on Commonwealth Care plans, $50 million to pay Optum for easing an application backlog and between $100 million and $145 million for the two-track plan.And that doesn’t include the cost of temporary Medicaid insurance for Bay Staters, which will be split between the state and feds.

http://bostonherald.com/business/healthcare/2014/05/health_connector_costs_surpassing_500m

Meanwhile in Oregon,

In the end, there were 73 million compelling reasons for Oregon to dump its expensive, troubled in-house health care exchange in favor of the federal exchange.

Trying to make the Oracle-based system fully functional would have cost at least $78 million, on top of the $248 million already spent, compared to about $5 million for moving to the federal system, Oregon Chief Information Officer Alex Pettit said Tuesday to the Legislature's Joint Committee on Legislative Audits, Information Management and Technology.

The third option, adopting another state's exchange, would have cost an estimated $45 million, Pettit said.

http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2014/05/cover_oregon_state_moves_to_fe.html

Debacles all around. In this case, Oregon will spend $5 million to switch the the fed exchange when they found out their ####ty website didn't work. Massachusettes wantts to build a new one for $121 million.

 

[Chris0nllyn]

Anyone remember Health Maintenance Organizations in the 90's?

They tried this before, and it didn't work. This time will be different though! You watch!