Free Republic

Oregon has determined it awarded Medicaid health benefits to more than 37,000 people during the past year who earned too much money or otherwise failed to qualify, new figures show. That high number represents nearly half the Medicaid recipients whose incomes the state rechecked this spring and summer. It has come to light as the state health authority works through a backlog of eligibility checks caused by technology problems and the spike in enrollment under the Affordable Care Act. The count surpasses predictions to the Legislature by agency director Lynne Saxton, who pegged the number at 32,000. And it almost...

Cover Oregon was the health insurance marketplace that the state set up pursuant to Obamacare for citizens to shop online for health care.  It is now defunct.  Cover Oregon is a case study in government incompentence and corruption.The $300 million the state got from Washington to build its exchange remains up in smoke. The state continues to pursue a lawsuit against its vendor, mostly, it seems, to drive up billables for a Portland law firm connected to John Kitzhaber, the former governor forced from office as the exchange was collapsing. About 170,000 people tried to sign up for Cover Oregon...

A bill dissolving Cover Oregon, the state's dysfunctional health insurance exchange, has been signed by Gov. Kate Brown. The measure, which had bipartisan support, transfers responsibilities for the Oregon exchange to the state Department of Consumer and Business Services. The decision was announced in a nine-word tweet from Brown's account, which said simply: "This afternoon I signed Senate Bill 1 into law." She signed the legislation Friday. Cover Oregon was plagued by problems almost from its onset. No Oregonian was ever able to enroll online in a private plan under the Affordable Care Act because the state exchange never had...

As a U.S. senator, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., makes $174,000 a year. So imagine his surprise a few months ago, when he learned the Cover Oregon health insurance exchange had enrolled him in the Oregon Health Plan, which covers only the poorest of the poor. Chalk up another embarrassing glitch for Cover Oregon, which remains a troubled work-in-progress after months of triage and more than $300 million in taxpayer money. A few months ago, Merkley opened the mail at his east Portland home to find he’d been enrolled in the Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan. The Oregon Democrat already had signed up...

The lack of ObamaCare accountability extends farther than just the boundaries of the Beltway. In fact, as The Oregonian discovers, it goes from sea to shining sea. The reviled director of Cover Oregon, whose failed web portal has prompted a federal investigation into potential fraud, supposedly resigned his post and got kicked out of his government sinecure. It turns out that he’s just on an extended vacation (via Drudge Report): Bruce Goldberg, the respected, long-time director of the Oregon Health Authority, offered to resign on March 18. Two days later, with the Cover Oregon tech mess going from bad...

The governor's office says federal prosecutors have subpoenaed state records for a grand jury investigation of the troubled Cover Oregon health insurance website. The state abandoned its plans for an independent site after it didn't work. They decided to switch to the federal portal, the first state to do so. The governor's office released subpoenas Tuesday issued by the U.S. attorney's office. They demand records of communications between state officials involved in developing the website, five of whom have resigned.

A large number of people who've signed up for private health insurers through the Cover Oregon health insurance exchange have not paid their first month's premiums, meaning they are at risk of going without coverage through November. "I've already had clients not pay and lose their coverage," says Lisa Lettenmaier, who owns the health insurance brokerage Health Source NW in Tigard. "It's imperative for people to pay their premiums on time." More than 81,000 people went through through Cover Oregon – either through paper or electronic applications—to select a private health plan. Of those, 5,000 have already cancelled policies or...

Massachusetts is preparing to abandon its troubled ObamaCare website, a system so problematic that the state was forced to enroll tens of thousands of people in temporary insurance plans through Medicaid.  The plan underscores the depth of technical problems with the Massachusetts Health Connector and echoes a recent decision by Cover Oregon, another glitch-ridden marketplace, to hand federal health officials the reins to its system this month.  Massachusetts officials are pursuing what they described as a "dual-track strategy" for their insurance marketplace, combining new, off-the-shelf enrollment software with a back-up plan to shift the system into HealthCare.gov if the transition takes...

After the Cover Oregon board of directors decided to scrap the troubled health exchange and transfer to the federal government’s site, a colleague asked me if the whole sorry saga was over. Far from it, I said. A host of questions remain that could take months to resolve. Here are a few that come to mind:

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called the now defunct Cover Oregon website the “biggest Obamacare train wreck in the entire country” Friday on MSNBC. “Today the state gave up and called for help on what has to be the biggest Obamacare train wreck in the entire country,” he said. “Oregon became the first state to dump its own troubled online health exchange and use the federal marketplace instead. Oregon spent $248 million of $305 million in federal grant, including $3 million on this cool ad campaign.”

Earlier today, Oregon became the first state-run health exchange to adopt the federal HealthCare.gov exchange portal. After receiving more than $300 million dollars in federal grants, the state struggled to sign up private insurance enrollees through their own online portal, Cover Oregon. Due to these difficulties and the projected costs of fixing the exchange, a technological advisory committee recommended to Oregon’s exchange board on Thursday that the state transition to using the federal exchange, rather than attempt to fix its existing exchange. Today, state officials approved the advisory board’s recommendation. Examining the cost projections between the two options, state officials...

The state of Oregon received $303 million in federal grants—more than all but two other states—to build and operate a health insurance exchange, dubbed Cover Oregon, under Obamacare. One of those grants was a $48 million "early innovator" grant for states whose exchanges were intended to serve as models for the nation. The state was among the most enthusiastic about implementing the law, with Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber touting both the law and his state's work building the exchange. The state's work on its exchange recieved praise throughout the media, and it was reportedly loved by the Obama administration: In...

After weeks of deliberation, a committee is poised to make a final recommendation Thursday on what to do with Oregon’s botched health insurance exchange portal. The technology committee will decide whether Cover Oregon should ditch its glitch-filled website and replace it with the federal government’s health insurance marketplace, or try to fix the existing system with the help of a new IT contractor. The decision comes nearly seven months after Oregon’s exchange was supposed to go live so that residents could use it to compare and buy health insurance plans. Cover Oregon’s website is seen as the worst of the...

Cover Oregon’s fizzled launch has been a high profile disaster for the state. After spending $160 million, Oregon’s health insurance exchange had exactly zero people sign up for private insurance in the first two months. Now Cover Oregon claims to have enrolled 7,300 people. However, the fine print from the Cover Oregon press release reveals that the suspiciously round number is actually an estimate. In fact, Cover Oregon has not indicated that a single person has paid their first bill, which is the industry’s measure of enrollment. As with any bureaucratic failure, finger-pointing is an unavoidable stage. Rather than trying...

PORTLAND, OR - Technology giant Oracle Corp. is pulling nearly two-thirds of its software developers from Oregon's troubled health insurance exchange project, even though the public still can't use the website to get coverage in one sitting and other key functions are unfinished. Cover Oregon spokesman Michael Cox said Thursday that 100 Oracle developers will leave this week, with 65 remaining. The cutbacks come after the online enrollment system was rolled out last week to insurance agents and community organizations. Cox says Cover Oregon is focusing on fixes to that system, with the hope of launching to the general public...

How did Cover Oregon blow through more than $120 million and end up with a completely non-functional website? One year ago, when Oregon officials raised questions about the project and the contracts going to Oracle, Oregon Health Authority CIO told other state officials in a Cover Oregon meeting that the Secretary of State’s office had conducted an audit of the contracts, and found no problem. A year later, no one can find any evidence of that audit, which adds yet another dimension to the allegations of fraud involving Carolyn Lawson and Cover Oregon. KATU continues its in-depth investigation of the...

If a large Oregon study is any indication, the Affordable Care Act may drive up frivolous emergency room visits and do little to improve people’s physical or economic health. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment began after Oregon budgeted to add several thousand people to their Medicaid rolls and held a lottery to fill the slots, giving researchers a randomized pool to test the effects of having health insurance. Winners were more likely to report being in good health and were less likely to default on medical bills. But there were also some surprising findings.

There still isn’t much in the way of good news for ObamaCare proponents coming out of Oregon, a state that was once so eagerly confident in their collective ability to deliver an exchange that was supposed to be a model of ease and efficiency for insurance-seeking Oregonians. Their exchange’s price tag upon the October launch date was sitting somewhere around $160 million, but the website has yet to successfully process a single customer, and the administration has since burned through another $40 million of their allotted $305 million from the federal government scrambling to fix it, according to one local...

The On Your Side Investigators revealed the colossal cost of Cover Oregon for the first time Monday and it shows how much of your tax money has been spent on the failed website. KATU learned Cover Oregon and the Oregon Health Authority collectively spent just shy of $200 million on its Cover Oregon website, which has been plagued with problems for months and still hasn't enrolled a single Oregonian for health insurance since the site launched Oct. 1, 2013. The state health insurance exchange's top dogs have been back and forth for months, extending the date when the website likely...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) - Valarie Henderson is disabled and has a respiratory ailment. Several weeks ago she filled out the 19-page application for Cover Oregon. They returned several pages and asked for more information about her income. But Cover Oregon also sent back personal information for two people she doesn't even know -- including the Social Security number of a 10-year-old boy and the name of what seems to be the boy's mother. "It's just basic information but information that doesn't belong to me," Henderson told KOIN 6 News. She was skeptical about Cover Oregon, but because she has a...