Breitbart News and others have chronicled the “Unmatched failure” that Cover Oregon has now officially become. As was pointed out on March 20 of this year, “The Oregon Obamacare exchange has received $305 million in taxpayer-funded federal grants, spent $160 million on its busted website, dropped $10 million on hipster promotional ads, erroneously enrolled 4,000 illegal immigrants in full Oregon Health Plan coverage contrary to federal law, and has not enrolled a single Oregonian online.”
Oregon was even given “a $48 million “early innovator” grant for states whose exchanges were intended to serve as models for the nation.” While the money was spent, clearly, that promised was never fulfilled.
State officials may finally be coming to grips with the idea that they have failed completely. It looks like the exchange will be closed down and turned over to the feds. Perhaps fittingly, the White House’s favorite exchange will be turned over to the White House.
Cover Oregon’s former Director rocky King had already resigned in January and he wasn’t the first, “King is the second official connected to the exchange to resign. He came under fire when the online enrollment system failed to go live in October. Technical problems with the exchange have been an embarrassment to the state and forced Oregonians to apply using paper applications. The state had to hire or reassign nearly 500 people to process applications by hand.”
On March 21 Breitbart News reported on questionable behavior as a processing center.
A former Cover Oregon employee is blowing the whistle on her working environment, claiming that employees were encouraged to push paper applications through the process despite obvious problems such as missing Social Security numbers.
The whistleblower appeared in an interview with KATU investigators which was published Thursday. She said when she questioned whether it was appropriate to process some of the claims she was seeing a manager told her to “quit stressing and go take a walk.” Another anonymous source told KATU “I’m not sure when it started but then eventually we were told, if they don’t have a social just go ahead and enter it, just push it on through.”
And from there, it just keeps getting worse, “Oregon’s state exchange is the “only one to fail so spectacularly that no residents have been able to sign up for coverage online since it opened early last fall. The Post added that it would cost the state between $4 and $6 million to move Cover Oregon’s exchanges into the federal insurance marketplace. But that is only a fraction of the $10 million the federal government awarded Oregon to promote those exchanges in what some mocked as the least informative but most trippy health insurance ads associated with the ACA.”
Now, with millions wasted on a massive failure in terms of development and millions more in protion of that which we now know will never work, this may prove to be the poster child for the ongoing failures of ObamaCare.
Long on problems and so short on answers there effectively aren’t any, Cover Oregon will revert to federal control. And it may not be the last state in which that has to happen.
“The Obama administration is poised to take over Oregon’s broken health insurance exchange, according to officials familiar with the decision who say that it reflects federal officials’ conclusion that several state-run marketplaces may be too dysfunctional to fix.
Unfortunately, there are few reasons to believe much of anything about the floundering law is functional, whether it’s being administered at the state, or federal levels.
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