MA Fires CGI for Health Connector Site Failures

by
in internet on (#3G9)
"CGI Group, the Montreal-based IT consulting company behind the botched rollout of the Federal Healthcare.gov site, has been removed from the Massachusetts Health Connector project. This comes about two months after being removed from Healthcare.gov, and a few weeks after CGI admitted the MA site 'may not be fully functioning by the end of June, and that one option under consideration is to scrap the multi-million-dollar site and start over.'

Like Oregon's similar troubles , Massachusetts uses paper submissions as a workaround to meet Federal sign-up requirements. 'The paper backlog fell to 21,000 pending applications, from 54,000 two weeks ago.'

If you are in the US, have you used Healthcare.gov or a State equivalent? If you are not in the US, do you use similar online systems in your nation?"
Reply 4 comments

NY State of Health (Score: 1)

by joshuajon@pipedot.org on 2014-03-18 18:50 (#NP)

I'm in NY and used our state health exchange site. While I was eventually able to get it to work, the user interface is very poorly designed and un-intuitive. I also twice encountered HTTP 500 errors which required me to re-login and start the application process over again.

Australia's state of health (Score: 1)

by nefariouswheel@pipedot.org on 2014-03-19 04:41 (#NZ)

Completely socialised, mate. Buried in our tax system.
Has been since Bob Hawke, and will continue to be if we can throw that drongo Abbott to the kerb.

Re: Australia's state of health (Score: 2, Informative)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-03-19 10:43 (#P1)

Same here in Canada, eh. No problems with our health system. Get a little card when you're born, show it off if you ever need to visit a doctor or hospital. Of course you can get insurance if you want extra stuff covered like say rare diseases, or brand name drugs. Generic drugs are normally covered under the national health plan, but most brand name drugs are covered if there's no generic equivalent.

We're not in danger of losing our health care, although King Harper has mentioned creating a two teared system a couple of times. One side is public and is basically what we have now, the other side is private and anyone with money can basically jump the line and get extra care. There are good and bad points to that in theory. For example, you'd take a lot of people out of the public system, which could shorten wait times for things like hip replacements, but we all know how that would really play out. The rich would get first dibs on the best doctors, facilities and equipment. Organs would go to the private system first, because they pay more for them and anyone without money would almost certainly be without hope for anything above a paper cut.

I imagine it wouldn't be too long before we end up in a system like they have in the US, where if you don't have insurance above the standard health card you probably wouldn't be treated.