insurance exchanges

Oregon has sued Oracle America for allegedly shoddy work on the Cover Oregon health exchange, The Oregonian's Nick Budnick reports. The state is prosecuting various theories all alleging that the IT firm fraudulently enriched itself at Oregon's expense.

Both sides blame each other for the failure to hire a systems integrator, or a general contractor to oversee Oracle's work, Budick further reports. When the systems integrator was not hired, Oracle became the primary contractor and ultimately was paid more than $103 million.

Outside counsel Markowitz, Herbold, Glade & Mehlhaf has been deputized to handle the case for the Oregon Department of Justice in exchange for a $2 million contract, Budnick concludes.

Several insurers who waited out the first round of health insurance applications through online exchanges are going to be selling policies through the exchanges next year, the New York Times reports. Even if insurers wait a year or two to enter the exchanges, they can still compete for customers because "people buying coverage in the individual market tend to be focused on price and may quickly switch plans if better deals become available," Larry Levitt, a Kaiser Family Foundation health policy expert told the Times.

An estimated $474 million in federal appropriations were spent on developing four state-level Obamacare exchanges that are "now in shambles," Politico reports. Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland now either have to move their residents onto the federal exchange or rebuild their systems, Politico further reports: "Nevada, for one, is still trying to figure out its future. Oregon has decided to switch to HealthCare.gov. Maryland wants to fix its own exchange, maybe by incorporating what worked in Connecticut. Massachusetts actually wants to do both — build a portal from scratch while planning a move to the federal exchange as a backup."

The FBI is looking into the problems that led Oregon to scrap its problematic health insurance exchange, the Wall Street Journal reports. The exchange was never fully functional, WSJ adds. Oregon is joining the federal exchange instead: "The state will going forward join roughly three dozen other states and use the federal exchange, which itself suffered multiple setbacks in 2013 but has since mostly recovered," WSJ reports.

Premiums for health insurance sold on the Obamacare's exchanges are going to be lower than expected, the Congressional Budget Office projects, according to the Wall Street Journal. The federal government is expected to spend $165 billion less than projected on subsidizing health-insurance plans, the WSJ further reports.

The New York Times reports on why the health-insurance exchanges have been so buggy: one factor was that the biggest contractor wasn't given specifications right away and only started writing software code this spring. Another factor was not rolling out a piece of the portal instead of the whole shebang at once. A third factor was that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "assumed the role of project quarterback, responsible for making sure each separately designed database and piece of software worked with the others, instead of assigning that task to a lead contractor." Sources told the NYT that CMS did not have the capacity to take on that role.

The result: "Many users of the federal exchange were stuck at square one. A New York Times researcher, for instance, managed to register at 6 a.m. on Oct. 1. But despite more than 40 attempts over the next 11 days, she was never able to log in. Her last attempts led her to a blank screen."