Posted on 03/29/2014 8:14:26 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Maryland to Drop Obamacare Exchange: 'Broken Beyond Repair' Cash wasted on this clunker. Geoffrey Norman March 29, 2014 10:45 AM
The state of Maryland has encountered many setbacks in its attempt to get a health care website up and running smoothly. (Sound familiar?) And now, it has run up the white flag. As Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post report:
… [Maryland] officials are set to replace the state’s online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut’s insurance marketplace, according to two people familiar with the decision, an acknowledgment that a system that has cost at least $125.5 million is broken beyond repair.
One of those officials would, of course, be the state’s governor, Martin O’Malley, a self effacing man who recently announced, after a fashion, that he might very well be running for President, even if that means taking on Hillary Clinton in a campaign for his party’s nomination. Not quite two months ago, when:
Asked whether he thought he would be a good president, O’Malley said, “Yes, I think I would be, for these times especially.”
As John Wagner of the Washington Post, wrote at the time, O’Malley:
… cited his adherence to “a new way of leadership in our country,” including the statistics-driven CityStat and StateStat initiatives he launched in Baltimore and Annapolis, respectively, to measure the performance of government agencies.
“It is very much a way of leadership that’s more collaborative, that’s much more open, that is performance-measured, that is much more interactive, and it is the new way of leadership in the information age,” he said. “I believe in my bones that this is the future.”
The present, however, is less splendid for people in Maryland where, as the governor says:
… we have been changing the flat tires on this rolling car for the last five, going on six months now. And it has gotten better with every new fix applied to it, [but it is] still not working as it was supposed to work.”
There should definitely be an in depth accounting of every penny of taxpayers money. Any discrepancies should be treated as criminality and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The ridiculously high amounts of tax money spent for these exchanges and websites is a thinly disguised money laundering operation.
None of these sites would cost anywhere near this kind of money in the real world.
Add Oregon’s disaster into the mix, and over a half billion dollars has gone down the rat hole in DC, MD and OR.
You can buy a lot of medical care for that kind of hope and change.
Will be ignored in the media.
Link please.
I spent the last 21 years of my programming career at a medium sized software company writing business applications. This included order processing and inventory control for one of the major cell phone companies that processed many thousands of orders a day, while shipping millions of phones per year, and the system ran smoothly.
Something’s very wrong if MD can’t get a system up and running in five years. Then again you have state bureaucrats dealing with Obama bureaucrats so I guess it’s not surprising.
$125 million here...$125 million there...
pretty soon you’re talking about some real money
Now that there’s some gooOOood governmenting~!
What’s scary is, if Owe’Malley gets the nom, he could very well win the election. After 2012, I have concluded that the American electorate overall is that dumb.
Typical Dems. They abandon their own system only to adopt one from a state that has an even bigger debt. Looks like more Marylanders will be fleeing across the Potomac (at least until Virginia sets up their own exchange, based upon Maryland’s old system).
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