Cover Oregon Now In Hands Of Company That Botched California EDD Upgrade
PORTLAND, Ore. (CBS13/AP) - Oregon has hired a tech firm to help transfer the botched Cover Oregon health insurance exchange to the federal exchange website and finish building the state's Medicaid system.
The Oregon Health Authority will pay DeloitteConsulting, LLC up to $18.4 million to be the systems integrator that oversees the transition.
The decision to forego a systems integrator on the original Cover Oregon website was widely blamed for contributing to the site's failure to launch.
Deloitte will create a website that will redirect Oregonians to the federal site to enroll in private plans and to OHA to enroll in Medicaid. It will also transfer the current Cover Oregon technology for Medicaid to the state's Medicaid system.
The transition will be finished by the next open enrollment in November.
Deloitte made headlines in California last September when a California Employment Development Department upgrade didn't go as planned, leaving thousands waiting to collect unemployment benefits.
An EDD employee came forward to CBS13, saying close to 600,000 unemployed Californians at the time were left without benefits after the system upgrade suffered a glitch. EDD disputed those numbers, but still, thousands of unemployed Californians were without their benefits for months.
The error forced EDD employees to work through weekends trying to cover the backlog.
EDD and Deloitte were grilled by the Assembly Insurance Committee, where the company admitted it didn't take enough time looking at stop-payment flags, which would mark a person ineligible for benefits.
Under the old system, correcting that issue would only take seconds. Under the new system from Deloitte, payments were delayed to eligible people for two months.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press.
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