Cover Oregon to Give Up-- Oregon to Likely Use National ObamaCare Exchange

The faithful have failed... after filling their pockets, of course.

Calling it quits after wasting how much money again? It's weird how some companies and individuals made bank off of this travesty. It all must be the Koch brothers or Dick Cheney's fault...


From the AP via Breitbart:

Oregon, once expected to be a national leader in the federal health care overhaul, on Thursday moved to become the first state to dump its troubled online health exchange and use the federal marketplace instead. 

A top Cover Oregon official, Alex Pettit, said fixing the existing system would be too costly at an estimated $78 million, would take too long to implement, and would be too risky. The state's site still isn't fully functional seven months after a failed launch. 

Pettit said switching to the federal system would cost $4 million to $6 million. 

An advisory committee made the recommendation to drop the glitch-filled site for private policies, but suggested that Oregon continue using its current technology for Medicaid enrollments. 

The Cover Oregon board will vote on the recommendation Friday. 

Oregon's exchange is seen as the worst of the more than a dozen states that developed their own online health insurance marketplaces. The state is the only one where the general public still can't use the website to sign up for coverage in one sitting — despite an early start building the site and millions of dollars from the federal government.  

[...]  

Oregon has received a total of $305 million in federal grants to fund its operations from 2011 through the end of this year. As of March, the state has spent nearly $248 million of that money, Cover Oregon interim executive director Clyde Hamstreet said. 

Most of that money went toward the botched portal: $134 million in federal funding was paid to Oracle Corp. for building the exchange, and an additional $7 million was spent on paper processing efforts. Currently, Oregonians must use a time-consuming, hybrid paper-online process to sign up for insurance.

$305 million plus for an utter failure. Way to go guys!

Dan Riehl has a more complete list of Cover Oregon's failures here.

I hope we can all expect this kind of machine-like precision when to comes to the quality of the health insurance, and in their responses to various complications that inevitably arise from medical coverage!

UPDATE: Oregon is a part of the $1 billion dollars of taxpayer money wasted on bad state health insurance exchanges.

The five worst health care exchanges:
Hawaii – $205,342,270
Oregon – $305,206,587
Maryland – $171,013,111
Massachusetts – $179,036,455
Vermont – $172,641,081
Total – $1,033,239,504

Numbers from cms.gov (via Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit linked above)

Way to go Dems!