Even Massachusetts Is Having Trouble With Its Obamacare Exchange

whitehouse.gov

How difficult was it to successfully build and launch one Obamacare's health insurance exchanges? So difficult that the one state that had already built a functional health insurance exchange couldn't do it. Via Politico, Massachusetts has struggled to get its new exchange technology to work properly:

Massachusetts created a Romneycare-inspired template for President Barack Obama's health reform effort. Now, as the Bay State is struggling to upgrade for the Obamacare era, its enrollment system is buckling under technical glitches like those that hobbled HealthCare.gov.

State officials are increasingly concerned that thousands of Massachusetts residents seeking coverage are lost in a wilderness of misfiled applications and cybermalfunctions. Now, they're moving ahead with a labor-intensive backup plan aimed at making sure that no one loses coverage when Obamacare starts in January.

Part of the problem here seems to be that Massachusetts relied on CGI, the same contractor that botched the federal system, to build its new exchange.

Even so, this further undercuts the popular notion that Obamacare is working in the states that weren't opposed to its goals, and the related idea that if Republican governors had just agreed to build exchanges on their own. Yes, officials in Massachusetts asked for some exemptions from the law's exchange requirements. But its political class was not broadly politically opposed to the Obamacare project, its goals, or its methods. The same goes for Maryland, Oregon, and Vermont which have also had significant troubles getting their health insurance exchanges to work smoothly.

Back in September, I noted that prior to Obamacare, the Massachusetts exchange didn't attempt some of the more complex real-time functionality that the federal health law required. 

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

Everything Obama sticks his dick in gets screwed… up.

[Agammamon]

Indeed – *this* is how Michelle looked before Obama got her into bed the first time.

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm48….._=nm_ov_ph

[MikeP]

Part of the problem here seems to be that Massachusetts relied on CGI…

Indeed. They should at least be relying on JSP.

[Curtisls87]

I would have gone PHP.

[MikeP]

Considering how the failure of the exchanges employs so much human labor, perhaps they could simply have had rooms full of people interpreting the HTTP requests, looking up the data straight from the database, doing the calculations themselves, and typing DHTML back down the socket.

Jobs!

And these would be high skilled people with high salaries.

Good jobs!

[PapayaSF]

My main regret is that a yellow dog Democrat friend, a semi-famous author, seems to have dropped off Facebook right around the Healthcare.gov launch. I had been telling him and his amen chorus that the exchanges would not be ready, and was consistently mocked. I was looking forward to a bit of I-told-you-so.

But there seems to be no sign of Peak Schadenfreude about this. It’ll go on for many months.

[Sevo]

Well, ol’ Chad seems to have lost his way to the innertubes, too.

[MikeP]

Now, they’re moving ahead with a labor-intensive backup plan aimed at making sure that no one loses coverage when Obamacare starts in January.

The true purpose of Obamacare slowly becomes clear…

It’s a jobs program!

[Sevo]

The SEIU approves of your statement.

[The Rt. Hon. Serious Man, Visc]

In a sane country the people who were screaming in October about Republican sabotage and their negative thoughts impacting the website performance would be routinely mocked in the mainstream media for their pathetic shilling.

[PapayaSF]

Somehow, Republicans never think of defending failed programs by blaming their failure on criticism from Democrats. Which is just as well, because the media would never let that pass unmocked.

[SusanM]

http://news.yahoo.com/obamacar…..00078.html

Is this accurate?

[PRX]

If you like your house you can give it to the state.

[Sevo]

I hadn’t seen it before, but it certainly reads as if it is one of the things that was in it when it was passed, if you get my drift.

[SusanM]

It’s these paragraphs that worry me the most.

“Medicaid, on the other hand, is a state-based and federally-subsidized welfare program, one that employs means-testing ? which includes ownership of assets as well as income levels. Medicaid programs include conditions that put recipients’ assets remaining after death at risk for seizure to reimburse taxpayers who footed the bill for the recipient’s health care during his/her lifetime.

This was done to prevent fraud, to ensure that limited resources went to the truly needy, and to recapture resources to cover future costs. Until now, though, Medicaid was a voluntary program, and the vast majority of people who entered into it had few assets to risk by signing up”

[Sevo]

A bit father down, they simply state the Medicaid amounts to a loan.
One of the ‘issues’ O’care was to solve was the fact that the cost of medical care sometimes drove people to bankruptcy.
To be honest, I didn’t see that as a problem requiring solution; is it better that you go bankrupt from buying one too many big-screen TVs or from hoping to cure what ails you?
Anyhow, from this it looks like they ‘solved’ that issue by simply prohibiting bankruptcy and taking your assets.
What a ‘fix’!

[NotAnotherSkippy]

Cold CA follows in MA’s footsteps:

http://www.startribune.com/pol…..16671.html

[MSimon]

How the war on drugs gave us ObamaCareLess

http://classicalvalues.com/201…..y-by-half/

[RishJoMo]

Wow man that makes a lot of sense dude.

http://www.PrivaWeb.tk