Cover Oregon was once a state health care exchange. It cost $300 million to set up, and it never worked. Now it’s up to Congress to figure out where all the money went. In the years running up to Obamacare’s 2013 launch, some states set up health care exchanges where their residents could shop for insurance. Cover Oregon was beset with problems from the very beginning. As the Portland Business Journal reported, the website was not ready for prime time when it rolled out, citizens were unable to enroll online when the program started and it had four different heads, including temporary ones, in its first year.
Cover Oregon became one of Obamacare’s worst disasters. The Statesman Journal’s editorial board wrote of Cover Oregon, “It is a failure. Its name should be permanently retired, to rest among the annals of worst-executed state projects.”
The state wound up suing Oracle, the company hired by the state as the developer of Cover Oregon. That’s when Cover Oregon ended, and Coverup Oregon began. Former Gov. John Kitzhaber, D, hired a campaign consultant to bury the bodies and shift blame from the state’s poor administration of the program to Oracle. “By her own admission,” Wilamette Week noted, this consultant “knew virtually nothing about health care reform or the reasons Cover Oregon had crashed. Her primary mission was not to save a beleaguered state program but to get Kitzhaber re-elected.”
Kitzhaber was ultimately forced to resign over a separate scandal. But when reports surfaced “that an official in Kitzhaber’s administration sought to destroy e-mails from the governor’s personal Gmail account,” the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote to the governor in February 2015, to see if any of the destroyed emails were related to the Cover Oregon catastrophe. The committee then wrote to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, asking them to give to the committee communications and documents about Cover Oregon.
Congress wanted to understand the extent of the problem and what the federal government’s involvement in it was, if any. The $300 million wasted by the taxpayers on Cover Oregon must be accounted for, and the billions doled out by CMS to set up all of the failed state health insurance exchanges should be returned to the U.S. Treasury.
Meanwhile, other state-based exchanges have folded, and still more are struggling. With enrollment numbers sagging, some states are adding new fees to insurance policies to prop up exchanges that were supposed to be self-sustaining. The experiment with funneling tax dollars to states to finance healthcare exchanges should be officially declared a failure, and the U.S. Treasury refunded for the billions it kicked in.
President Obama’s claim that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” turned out to be one of the biggest lies ever told by a president. But close on its heels was the promise that state-based exchanges — which originally were supposed to operate in all 50 states — would add value for the consumer rather than simply make insurance more expensive for consumer and taxpayer alike.
Congress has an obligation to investigate what happened and to make Oregon and the other states that received federal money to return it to the Treasury. There should be no deals with states to let them keep portions of the money already spent. The federal taxpayer at least deserves to have his fiscal health attended to.
Neil Siefring is president of Hilltop Advocacy, LLC, and a former Republican House staffer. Follow Neil on Twitter @NeilSiefring . Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
