Oregon's health insurance network has been dogged by technical glitches that have prevented even a single subscriber from enrolling online and is now changing its state health exchange to the federal system, officials said on Friday, according to the Associated Press.
A state that fully embraced the Affordable Care Act, Oregon endured one of the rockiest rollouts of President Barack Obama's, the AP reported.
healthcare law, requiring tens of thousands of applicants to use paper forms since launching on October 1, according to the AP. Managers of the state exchange, Cover Oregon, determined it would cost about $78 million to fix the beleaguered exchange, well above the projected cost of switching over to the federal system.
On Friday, the Cover Oregon Board of Directors voted unanimously to accept a recommendation by a technology advisory group to shift the private insurance side of the program to the federal exchange, the AP reported. The Medicaid portion will move to the Oregon Health Plan.
"I don't know that anybody sitting in the room was excited about the proposal that's getting put forth, but at least my impression felt like it was the best option that we had in front of us for those constraints," Cover Oregon Board of Directors Chairwoman Liz Baxter said, according to the AP.
The transition could mean some Cover Oregon employees lose their jobs, said Clyde Hamstreet, Cover Oregon interim executive director, the AP reported. Cover Oregon has 190 full time and 270 temporary employees.
Several Cover Oregon officials, including two past directors of the program, have resigned in recent months amid an independent investigation that found mismanagement of the system and a failure to report problems from the beginning, according to the AP.
Other states like Maryland and Massachusetts also considered shifting their state-run exchanges to the federal network after experiencing technical problems, the AP reported. Maryland ultimately kept its exchange intact using special technology developed by Connecticut to manage the system, at a cost of about $45 million, Pettit said.
