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A new report exposes serious allegations of fraud in the Massachusetts health care exchange, which could lead to a federal investigation of the state’s health exchange records.
When Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges officially launched in October, 2013, one of the worst performers was, somewhat ironically, located in the one state that already had a functioning health insurance exchange: Massachusetts. The state had been running its own online insurance portal for years as part of RomneyCare, the coverage expansion that would become the model for Obamacare. But the exchange the state already had in place, while functional, didn’t have all of the features required by Obamacare. A total overhaul was required.
But when Obamacare’s exchanges went live, the upgrade turned out to be a downgrade. Despite years of administrative planning and development, funded largely by $135 million federal grants, the Massachusetts Health Connector basically didn’t work at all during the first open enrollment period. Repair efforts stalled, and eventually the entire thing was scrapped so that the state could start all over again on yet another new exchange. The original tech contractor, CGI (which also worked on the botched federal exchange) was fired from the project, and a new team was brought in to start over.
It’s been clear for a while now that the project was massively mismanaged, but it now looks increasingly as if development of the exchange may have involved illegality as well as incompetence.
Not only did the officials in charge of the exchange botch the job, they are now accused of having intentionally misrepresented their progress (or lack thereof) to federal officials. A stinging report released yesterday by the Pioneer Institute, based on official contemporaneous audit reports by an outside consultant and unnamed “whistleblowers” who were interviewed by the report’s author, Josh Archambault, alleges that state officials lied to federal overseers about progress on the project and cheated on a key federal connectivity test, employing what was essentially a dummy system in order to cover for work that had not yet been completed.
Reason senior editor Peter Suderman explains the report in more depth here.
If true, this scandal is corruption and deception in the first degree, and further proof that the Left will do anything to advance their political agenda, even at the expense of American families.
