So after six months of saying things are fixable, the state of Maryland is finally throwing in the towel on its online health exchange and using the technology which supposedly works for Connecticut? And it only cost us $125 million that we will likely never see again? But that’s not all – according to the Washington Post story by Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson:
It was not immediately clear how much more money Maryland may have to invest to get a fully functioning system, according to the two individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes.
Can anyone say blank check? I think gubernatorial candidate and Delegate Ron George might be able to:
We cannot allow the O’Malley/Brown administration to get away with wiping this scandal under the rug and forget that over $260 million taxpayer dollars were doled out to large corporate special interests in exchange for a broken website. The Maryland Health Exchange never stood a chance because the administration approached the Affordable Care Act as a pile of federal money they could convert into favors for political allies and donors. We have been taken to the cleaners by these vendors.
I ask the Attorney General to take the primary contractors, including prolific O’Malley/Brown donors Maximus Inc, to court to win back our wasted tax dollars. As a sitting delegate, I call on the Department of Justice to appoint a federal prosecutor to begin investigations into how these vendors contracts were procured and at what stage these vendors knew the exchange was never going to effiectively operate. The citizens of Maryland deserve a full and thorough investigation into the collapse of our state exchange.
Not to be outdone, the Larry Hogan campaign chimed in:
The O’Malley-Brown administration was one of the first and most vocal proponents of the new healthcare law, touting itself as a national model for the Affordable Healthcare Act. Lt. Governor Brown, the O’Malley administration’s point man on the rollout, was eager to take credit for prior to the rollout. Yet the news out of our state since the day the exchange opened has been nothing short of embarrassing and now, Lt. Governor Brown and the rest of the administration has done nothing but seek to evade accountability.
After learning of the state’s plans to scrap its exchange entirely (the only state to do so), the Hogan-Rutherford campaign urges that the Lt. Governor should have no further dealings with the exchange, that all of Lt. Governor Brown’s and the administration’s correspondence with those in charge of the exchange be made public, and that an independent, thorough audit of what happened in this horrible failure be conducted immediately, the findings of which made available to the public prior to the November election.
Unfortunately, the chances of a “full and thorough investigation” or “independent, thorough audit” are roughly equal to the probability of the glue factory reject winning the Preakness. This guy named Anthony Brown is having those skids greased for his ascension to the Maryland political throne, which is odd because one would think his opponent, the Attorney General Doug Gansler, could take advantage of such an investigation. He sure seemed to go for the headlines in many previous cases.
But let’s say the state somehow manages to prevail in court. All that will do is tap out the liability insurers the vendors use, and of course they will either have to raise their rates for all small businesses or come hat in hand to the government, or both. Welcome to the modern America.
So we ask again: while you can’t say everything was perfect back then, just what was irretrievably wrong with the system circa 2008? It’s pretty obvious the 2014 system isn’t working all that well.
And then you have this video:
Let’s see if it can go viral.