Even Massachusetts Is Having Trouble With Its Obamacare Exchange

How difficult was it to
successfully build and launch one Obamacare’s health insurance
exchanges? So difficult that the one state that had already built a
functional health insurance exchange couldn’t do it. Via
Politico, Massachusetts has
struggled to get its new exchange technology to work
properly:

Massachusetts created a Romneycare-inspired template for
President Barack Obama’s health reform effort. Now, as the Bay
State is struggling to upgrade for the Obamacare era, its
enrollment system is buckling under technical glitches like those
that hobbled HealthCare.gov.

State officials are increasingly concerned that thousands of
Massachusetts residents seeking coverage are lost in a wilderness
of misfiled applications and cybermalfunctions. Now, they’re moving
ahead with a labor-intensive backup plan aimed at making sure that
no one loses coverage when Obamacare starts in January.

Part of the problem here seems to be that Massachusetts relied
on CGI, the same contractor that botched the federal system, to
build its new exchange.

Even so, this further undercuts the popular notion that
Obamacare is working in the states that weren’t opposed to its
goals, and the related idea that if Republican governors had just
agreed to build exchanges on their own. Yes, officials in
Massachusetts asked for some exemptions from the law’s exchange
requirements. But its political class was not broadly politically
opposed to the Obamacare project, its goals, or its methods. The
same goes for Maryland, Oregon, and Vermont which have also had
significant troubles getting their health insurance exchanges to
work smoothly.

Back in September, I noted that prior to Obamacare, the
Massachusetts exchange didn’t attempt
some of the more complex real-time functionality that the
federal health law required.