ObamaCare’s Big Dig
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacares-big-dig-1431299268
The Massachusetts exchange is under federal investigation.
The catastrophic ObamaCare rollout merely two years ago has disappeared into the distant political past, forgotten, with zero accountability for the taxpayer waste and disruption to individuals and business. Massachusetts may prove to be an exception.
Late last week the administration of Republican Governor Charlie Baker confirmed that the FBI and U.S. Attorney for Boston have subpoenaed records related to the commonwealth’s “connector” dating to 2010. This insurance clearinghouse was Mitt Romney’s 2006 beta version for ObamaCare’s exchanges, but updating the connector to comply with the far more complex federal law became a fiasco rivaling any of the other federal and state ObamaCare failures.
The target of the investigation hasn’t been disclosed. But the best autopsy of the connector mess is being published Monday by Boston’s Pioneer Institute think tank, where Josh Archambault reviews internal audits and whistleblower testimony he obtained. The evidence is damaging to both Massachusetts’s exchange contractor, CGI Corp., and the administration of former Democratic Governor Deval Patrick.
Mr. Archambault reveals years of third-rate technological work, disregarded deadlines, pervasive mismanagement, little outcome measurement and general bureaucratic incompetence. An outside auditor noted as early as 2012 that the “quantity and/or skills/experience level of project resources may be impacting the ability to complete project tasks within planned timeframes” and questioned if staff were “sufficiently knowledgable.”
A test before going public showed a 90% failure rate, and the new connector detonated on the launch pad. Some 320,000 residents attempting to gain coverage had to be dumped into a temporary “free” Medicaid program without any income eligibility determination. Pioneer pegs the total cost of the mess at around $1 billion.
CGI almost certainly broke its contractual obligations to Massachusetts, though Mr. Archambault notes that the project routinely attempted to conceal problems rather than fix them. High-level political appointees repeatedly misrepresented their progress to Health and Human Services officials, whether out of ignorance or perhaps to keep the federal ObamaCare-funding spigot flowing.
One insider tells him that “It’s like when you’re a kid and you do something wrong and you are waiting to be caught. We were waiting for people to recognize how bad this was, because we had done everything we could to escalate. We were always told to be quiet, it doesn’t matter, don’t say anything.” Perhaps the feds are investigating these false government claims.
In other words, the Massachusetts ObamaCare experience was not merely a problem of quality control but of political accountability—or worse. Earlier this year Governor Baker requested and received the resignations of four of the 11 members of the connector board, including MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare architect who earned fame for mocking “the stupidity of the American voter.”
Such punishment is richly deserved, but it is a sad comment on American politics that law enforcement may prove to be the only other institution that holds someone responsible for failure.
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