No promises from Cover Oregon director about new deadline
Source: Statesman Journal
Cover Oregon executive director Rocky King faced legislators Wednesday to address questions of credibility, budgets, promises and deadlines during committee meetings at the Capitol.
The answers that the lawmakers received weren’t all that promising, close to two months after the state health insurance exchange’s launch and no known enrollees. Technical problems have prevented Cover Oregon’s ability to support online enrollment, leading to the hiring or reassignment of about 400 workers to manually process applications.
Rep. Jason Conger, R-Bend, echoed many frustrated lawmakers’ views during the joint health care committee hearing.
“This would be a bad joke about the state’s inability to build and deploy a large IT project, except for the fact that it’s affecting people’s lives,” Conger said. Cover Oregon’s main stumbling block has been the feature that is supposed to determine an applicant’s eligibility for financial assistance to help pay for premiums or publicly funded health insurance for low-income people. Unsatisfactory tests run days before Oct. 1 indicated to King that the feature was too unstable to roll out to the public.
Oracle, Cover Oregon’s main IT contractor, initially promised it would complete the system by the end of October, but that deadline was missed. On Wednesday, King told legislators that the new deadline Oracle offered is Dec. 16, which is the day after the deadline to enroll for coverage that begins Jan. 1.
Still, King was not ready to tell lawmakers with confidence that Oracle would be able to follow through on its latest commitment.
“I no longer use the word hope,” King said during the Joint Committee on Legislative Audits, Information Management and Technology hearing. “I learned through this experience that’s not an optimal word when it comes to an IT project. “I’m not hoping anything.”..................................
Read more: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20131121/NEWS/311210035/No-promises-from-Cover-Oregon-director-about-new-deadline
If even ORACLE cant get it right, that explains a lot of things. Is Ellison a Republican by chance?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Scuba
(53,475 posts)
busterbrown
(8,515 posts)working successfully.. Fire these idiots.. This is effecting the national message. In a progressive state no less..
fredamae
(4,458 posts)
BodieTown
(147 posts)If you go to Opensecrets, you will see that Oracle gave just over $5 million to a variety of candidates. At first glance, it appears they favor Democrats. NOT REALLY.
Look more closely.
A whopping $3 million went to "Restore Our Future", which was Mitt Romney's group. Another half million to Republican Governors Assn. Additional to Mitt directly, etc., etc., etc.
I see very little focus on Oracle, which certainly HAS TO have the technical expertise to get CoverOregon working on time.
Something stinks to high heaven with this story and with Oracle.
joc46224
(62 posts)I once interviewed for an IT job at Oracle in the Bay Area. I remember sitting in a room with about 6 IT people who would be my co-workers were I to get the job. The tension in that room was palpable and I wanted to run from it screaming. Oracle is notorious for paying it's employees very little while demanding a lot. "Slave shop" is often used to describe Oracle's IT department. I was offered the job but turned it down. I still have to deal with Oracle quite a bit since we have several Oracle products that support our environment. The tech support from Oracle is awful. They've outsourced pretty much all of it to offshore support and I can get the same help, if not better, from google. Recently Oracle bid on a project to help set up replication of our production database from one site to a DR site. They wanted a million dollars. We said "no" and were able to get something working in-house for less than $100K. I'm not at all surprised to hear that Oracle over-promised and under-delivered on Cover Oregon.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)It is possible that there was/is some underhandedness going on, of course, but conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats aside, this sounds like awful project management. Apparently they never decided what they really wanted until it was too late to do it on time. Add in a little petulance and foot-dragging by the less than enthusiastic, and a more ambitious project than attempted in other places, and this is what they get. Apparently they knew this could go bad as early as last year.
According to the article below, here, it is working for the simple apps, but when pregnancies and other factors get involved, that's where it begins to break down, and they want to make sure it doesn't give out incorrect information like Washington State and the 8000 people they are notifying of bad quotes.
...
Oregon Health Authority Chief Information Officer Carolyn Lawson said the bulk of the infrastructure development began in the summer of 2011, as Cover Oregon was establishing its business plan. At the same time, new rules were emerging from the federal government — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “We’d make assumptions and as things got refined, they’d say, ‘we wanted it to function this way,’ ” Lawson said. “We’d pull out that Lego, make some adjustments and put it back in again.” At the same time, Cover Oregon was building the front end of the system, or how the public experiences the website. “We had the IT piece going for a while, but it’s like telling somebody to build a car without telling them what the car should look like,” King said. “A lot of people think we got a big head start. It really wasn’t a head start.”
Cover Oregon is also a more complex system than the federal law required and that other states have built, Lawson said. It includes 11 insurance carriers in the individual market and eight carriers in the small business market, which all have their own interfaces that communicate and exchange data with Cover Oregon. Ten dental carriers are selling plans on the exchange, too. The website also incorporates publicly funded Oregon Health Plan and Healthy Kids, with the goal that people who qualify for those benefits could enroll without having to navigate additional websites, forms or phone trees.
Oregon’s system also has 1,700 rules written into the “rules engine,” which are meant to help the software understand the diverse complexities of household scenarios. Eligibility for tax credits or state programs is determined based on income and dependents, and a combination of factors such as a pregnancy or mixed families could lead to a wrong eligibility determination. “We didn’t want to have that happen here in Oregon,” Lawson said. “The 1,700 rules are very, very complex.” Other systems around the country are using as few as 250 rules, she said.
In another unforeseen circumstance, Cover Oregon took over the system development two months earlier than planned, because the Oregon Health Authority ran out of its grant funding. King said the transition didn’t slow down the work, but that it was abrupt. Soon after the hand-off, Cover Oregon’s Karjala said, he became concerned about the technological setbacks and demanded that Oracle provide additional support to fix them. Currently, a senior vice president and an elite group Oracle calls its “A-Team” are working full-time and some weekends on the website, and Oracle is footing the bill, Karjala said.
...
BodieTown
(147 posts)Don't insult our intelligence with crap statements like that.
Koch money has infiltrated Oregon, to unseat a Democratic governor and a solid Democratic majority in state government.
RW organizations and corporations are bending over backwards to stop progress, not only at the national level, but at the state level. Oregon is one of the bluest states in the country.
When somebody like you spews out "conspiracy theories" and "tinfoil hats", it is a form of ridicule, and it means, STFU. If it does not mean that to you, then stop using RW code on this site.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)oooo, scawy, scawy 'publicans - booga booga booga <- that's all?
And they said manufacturing was dead. Yet here you are making excuses...too bad they aren't worth anything.
passiveporcupine
(8,175 posts)Oracle, Cover Oregon’s main IT contractor, initially promised it would complete the system by the end of October, but that deadline was missed. On Wednesday, King told legislators that the new deadline Oracle offered is Dec. 16, which is the day after the deadline to enroll for coverage that begins Jan. 1.
[quote]the open enrollment period is October 2013 through March 2014.[/quote]
source...cover oregon
DeschutesRiver
(2,354 posts)Of course, one can apply anytime during open enrollment, but for many of us here in Oregon, our old self paid policies end on dec. 31st, and if we apply after dec 15, we won't have coverage on Jan. 1 when we need it.
I also just read that cover oregon's rocky king said if we want coverage starting jan 1, we now need to have the application in by December 4, not the 15th (just saw that today at ktvz news 21).
We applied much earlier, & called to confirm our app was received. But haven't heard anything more. It is kind of nerve wracking to not know if we will be uninsured come Jan. 1st for the first time in 30 years of being self employed and paying through the nose for blue cross. I have the replacement cover oregon silver policy picked out, but can do nothing until they process my app (we can buy the policy directly but then there would be no subsidy and we cannot afford it without that, as it will be approx $800 per month).
Do not know what else to do except to keep calling to see when we will be allowed to buy our new policy.
passiveporcupine
(8,175 posts)Yeah, I'm on Medicare, but it took six months to get on it after signing up. It's a screwed up system. We need single payer for all. We won't really be able to care for everyone who needs it until we have that.
I hope they get you squared away soon. Yeah, the exchanges are not cheap, and without subsidies, many people will not be able to afford them.
DeschutesRiver
(2,354 posts)Agree that our system of health insurance purchasing instead of health care is still severely messed up and won't be fixed until we all go single payer.
I was looking at silver plans that had at least somewhat lower deductibles and OOPs, and the cost ranged from the 600s to 1200+ per month (at our income, the sweet spot for some policies was around $800), plus you’d need to pay the deductible annually and the max OOP on top of that, neither of which are covered by a subsidy as the premiums are. So with some plans, one could get preventative treatment and a diagnosis relatively cheaply, but might have no way to pay the up to $6,000 max annual OOP to get the treatment required by your diagnosis. Yet the insurance company will get a check for the whole premium whether I can afford to pay the OOP in the event of a bad illness or not.
Dh will be medicare age in 5 years, so I will keep in mind that there may be a gap between sign up and effective date. There is always some catch to these things, isn't there? And will dig further to see if anyone at cover oregon can answer whether Jan 1 is the effective date of coverage. I will say that every call we have made has been answered by exceptionally nice people who either have the answers or will look them up and get back to us. Plan to call bcbs on Monday to see if they will let us keep our current plan through January just in case.
passiveporcupine
(8,175 posts)was because I couldn't afford to sign up for it when I was first eligible. I had to get some loans to fix my house so I could get a mortgage, and while I was paying off those loans I couldn't afford Medicare. So I now pay a lot more for Medicare (10% for each year I couldn't sign up) and I had to wait six months from the date of signing up. Once you are eligible, please get it. You are penalized for life it you don't. I think it would be far more fair to penalize the user for the same number of years they waited to sign up, instead of for life, but that's not the way it works.