Massachusetts Health Exchange is Still Broken—and Won’t Be Fully Functional Until Next Fall

The Massachusetts health policy overhaul
that Mitt Romney signed into law in 2006 was
an explicit model for the 2010 federal reform.

Like Obamacare, the Massachusetts plan featured an individual
mandate, subsidies for low income individuals to purchase health
coverage, and a government-run online exchange to facilitate
shopping for insurance.

Obamacare backers argued that the success of Massachusetts’
reform proved that Obamacare would work everywhere else. Instead,
the Bay State is one of the places where Obamacare is most
obviously broken. Under Obamacare, the state’s exchange simply
doesn’t work.

When Obamacare’s network of state and federal exchanges launched
last October, Massachusetts had to upgrade its technology in order
to meet the federal law’s specifications. But practically speaking,
the upgrade has been a complete failure. The system has so far been
unable to process anyone through the system electronically.

Obamacare’s first open enrollment period—the window of time in
which all people are allowed to buy policies through the law’s
exchanges—ends in just a few weeks, at the end of March. But in
late February, state officials
admitted that their upgraded exchange would likely not be fully
operational by June, the extended enrollment date granted to it by
the federal government.

Today
the state announced that it will sever its relationship with CGI
Federal, the tech vendor responsible for building both the
Massachusetts exchange and the problem-plagued federal exchange.
The Boston Globe reports:

“We have made the decision we’re going to be parting ways with
CGI,” said Sarah Iselin, who was hired recently by Governor Deval
Patrick to oversee repairs to the website, which hasn’t worked
properly since it was launched last October. The state has
scrambled since then to sign up thousands of residents for health
insurance that meets the requirements of the federal Affordable
Care Act, resorting to using paper applications.

Iselin said that the state will ask for a further extension of
its enrollment window, the Globe reports. Officials say they hope
that the state will have a finished, functional exchange ready and
online for the 2015 open enrollment period, which begins next
fall.