HealthCare.gov wasn't the only bogged-down health insurance website. A number of states have struggled with the contractors who built their sites
since launching in October.
While Oregon had been an early supporter of the president’s health care law, moving swiftly to set up its own online exchange for uninsured residents to buy health insurance, the website rollout has been widely panned. Cover Oregon still does not have a fully operational online exchange and enrollees have had to use paper applications. Last week, Cover Oregon Executive Director Rocky King resigned. In December, Oregon Health Authority’s chief information officer, Carolyn Lawson, who was responsible for setting up the exchange, departed. [...]
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said Wednesday that she is considering suing CGI over its work on the state’s exchange. Gov. Deval Patrick wouldn’t say whether he wants to sue but made it clear that he’s upset with the company. [...]
Just this week, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin told state lawmakers that he took responsibility for his state’s poor exchange rollout but shared the blame with the state’s main exchange contractor, CGI. [...]
The state has already withheld more than $5 million from CGI’s payments over the problems.
In Minnesota, Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton lays the blame with IBM for not delivering the customer service the state promised to residents using its exchange, MNsure.
Politico frames this story as Democrats trying to pass the buck to place the blame for the bumpy rollout on "Big Business." But since these businesses were all contracted to do the coding, it's hard to not see that these Democrats have a good point. Clearly, at the state and the federal government levels, oversight was a problem since these horribly broken systems were allowed to go online and seemingly caught everyone by surprise.
In terms of broken software as a political problem for Democrats, though, this is kind of a stretch. First, the American people have moved on, and just aren't paying attention to this story to any real degree anymore. We're also a nation of computer users that is really used to broken software and frustrating system. Trying to keep milking this as a big political problem for the Democrats is not too likely to work.