Noridian to pay $45 million to state, U.S. government for flawed exchange – writes the Washington Post.
“Then-Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), now a presidential candidate, predicted the Maryland marketplace and its accompanying Web site would be among the best in the nation. But Noridian’s online portal failed within minutes of launching on Oct. 1, 2013.”
Great stuff! No surprise, then, that O’Malley is hovering at around 1% in national Dem Primary polls. Looks like it’s not just name recognition he’s lacking: There isn’t really that much excitement about his record as a Governor.
Please share widely!
I would almost think so, as there aren’t many people on this board interested at all in O’Malley. And of course the MA Connector is one of my bêtes noires. This doesn’t look good when O’Malley is promoting his credentials as a data-driven administrator.
But then almost every exchange was a disaster. Except for Connecticut, whose software Maryland ended up using. CT was trying to get their money back from Massachusetts but I read that they had moved on. Their former CEO Kevin Counihan is now the CEO of the federal exchange. Shame on you Massachusetts.
Your name does not appear anywhere in the post, so it isn’t “addressed directly” to you.
What’s up with “Shame on you Massachusetts?” Were we somehow responsible for O’Malley’s failed health exchange? If so, please explain.
I just wasn’t sure of the purpose of Andrei’s post, BMG is not exactly a hotbed of O’Malley fans. It was successful in giving me, at least, something to think about.
As for Massachusetts, that’s just a “people who live in glass houses” cautionary warning. (After all, I am sure the vast majority of the readers here voted for Deval Patrick … ) Reading through some of the news stories on the Maryland exchange, it looks like what they did was go out and hire a contractor who had worked with CMS. Makes sense, MD is full of federal contractors. Then when the contractor (Noridian) didn’t deliver, they fired them and turned to the state of Connecticut, who was marketing their successful exchange solution to other states. The Connecticut angle makes Massachusetts look worse than Maryland, as we were initially in a consortium with CT to develop the ACA exchange. Whatever made them go their own way I don’t know, but there are some hints in the article that I linked. Perhaps there are other readers here that know more.
If you were a governor in 2014, chances are very high that you messed up the ACA implementation in some big way.
I’m one of those people on this board “interested” in Mr. O’Malley. What’s next, a post that says “the sun rose in the eastern sky over Baltimore this morning”? Systems like this are hard. Government’s, like MD and MA, don’t have the resources (money or people) to do them well.
More importantly, this is an isolated sniper-shot that is not helpful in comparing candidates. This post strikes me as comparable to articles that observe that the Benghazi attack happened on Hillary Clinton’s watch. Indeed, it did. So what?
Is there another governor in the race? Was Mr. Sanders or Ms. Clinton involved or remotely responsible for a high-tech system rollout like this? Suppose, hypothetically speaking, that our approach to governance makes it essentially impossible for any government to succeed at a task like this. Do we improve the situation by rejecting a candidate who happened to be governor at the time?
Perhaps the thread-starter might mention the last paragraph of the cited story:
At this stage of a campaign, I’m mostly interested in information that helps me choose among the several candidates. This article, and issue, does not help me make that choice.