Yet Another ObamaCare State Insurance Exchange “Success Story”
Hawaii’s health insurance exchange – called “The Connector” – was awarded approximately $200 million in Federal subsidies. To date, it’s spent about $100 million of those subsidies.
Turns out it’s done just about as well the ObamaCare exchanges in Oregon. Or Maryland.
So, just how many people has The Connector signed up? Less than 10,000 – 9,217 individuals plus 628 of its own employees and dependents, to be precise. And it’s raised just a bit over $40,000 in user fees ($40,350).
The bottom line: The Connector has spent roughly $10,100 of Federal tax money per person it signed up. Yeah, that’s a “really good deal”.
In fact, it’s so bad that the CEO of Hawaii’s largest insurance provider has called for The Connector to be shut down. Sound familiar?
But don’t worry. In that socialist paradise Hawaii, they’ve got this under control.
All they need is an unlimited supply of Federal money, and they’ll have it fixed “real soon now”.
The sooner we rid ourselves of this abomination called ObamaCare, the better.
PS: In case you were wondering, apparently the state-run exchanges in Nevada and Massachusetts are in p!ss-poor shape, too. Between them, they’ve burned through $260 million in Federal funds (or will have, when Massachusettes decides what they’re going to do with their exchange) – and neither works worth a damn. They’re both so bad that both states are currently considering trashing their in-house attempts to create a state-run exchange and using that exemplar of missing functionality, HealthCare.gov, instead.
Category: Health Care debate
The Massachusetts Healthcare Connector is an abysmal failure. I am wondering where all the “Obamacare is just Romenycare” folks are at, because since the ACA took effect it has caused what was a reasonably functional program (albeit expensive) to crash!
The answer I am hearing now from my “enlightened” friends is that Obamacare did not go far enough, that it should be all out Universal healthcare, because only then witll the Government be able to manage the health care challenges posed by Obamacare.
Sounds like you need new friends.
“…only then will the Government be able to manage the health care…”
Yeah, they’ve done so well with the VA system.
I must be missing something because for the life of me, I can’t see why building a ‘connector’ website could conceivably cost that much. This isn’t a problem intrinsic to Obamacare, it’s either earmarks for politicians, straight-up theft by contractors, utter incompetence of people in leadership roles, or all three. Probably all three.
I’ll also leave this article – and here’s a choice quote: “Indeed, according to the research firm the Standish Group, 94 percent of large federal information technology projects over the past 10 years were unsuccessful — more than half were delayed, over budget, or didn’t meet user expectations, and 41.4 percent failed completely.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/opinion/getting-to-the-bottom-of-healthcaregovs-flop.html?_r=0
The article also mentions the infamous VCF ‘upgrade’ for the FBI, as well as a few other horror stories.
And, for fun, if nobody has seen this yet, this is exactly how I envision things going down: (“The Expert”)
The costs seem obscene to me too, LC. But it’s not an isolated outcome, either.
So far, at least 5 of the 15 state-developed exchanges (MA, NV, MD, OR, and HI) have been outright failures. So has Healthcare.gov – reputedly it’s spent over $600M, and is barely half-done.
Erg. Apologies for the terrible formatting of that — I’d intended it to just be a link, not an embed. (Maybe I can fix it for $37M and four years of work.)
Hell, LC – I’ll fix it for ya for 1/4 of that. (smile)
Don’t forget the Hawaii Connector also burned through $57 million of State taxpayer money and are asking for anothe $15 miilion to get through the rest of this year, although, to be fair, they have not yet spent the other half of the $200 million Federal grant. And the company hired to design the Hawaii site? CGI of course.
We can only hope that they run out of other people’s money.
I have been working on IT projects for a while. I cannot think of one that was on time, on budget, and contained everything in the original spec. The spec always changes — a situation called “scope creep” — and that causes redesign and rework and forces the dates to slip.
I am aware of a project undertaken by one of the world’s largest consulting companies for a very large PC maker. After 2 years and something like $50 million, they killed the project and wrote off the money they had spent.
I know of a services contract for $125 million where the vendor promised to handle help desk calls. But the vendor’s internal process was incapable of meeting the service level agreement. This fact was known by both parties before the contract was signed. After about 2 years, the customer paid the vendor $5 million in penalties and cancelled the contract.
From the perspective of the consulting company who gets a large IT contract, the most important part is the section about change orders. That is where they get to make real money. If you get a chance to read a contract for a large project, look at the parts about quality — if there is one — and deliverables. Remember those kids in school who were great at creative writing? They were all trained as lawyers and they now work for consulting companies.
FWIW, some people brag on a software development technique called agile. It works great for a small team – fast, cheap, good quality, rapid deployment. It doesn’t work for large projects.
I hear the “agile development” motto is:
“Specs? We don’ need no steenkin’ specs!”
To me, asking Government bureaucracy to fix ANYTHING is akin to expecting a retarded one-eyed chimpanzee on LSD to repair a Rolex watch with a sledge hammer!