I don't know what they're putting in the water over at CBS News, but please, whatever it is, keep it coming. This morning they continued their merciless ObamaCare reporting with a piece on the state exchanges. The ACA-faithful generally love to argue that only the federal exchanges are really having problems. They point to (likely inflated) signup numbers at the state-run sites and argue that the system works; it's just the feds who are "experiencing technical difficulties."
Unfortunately, that's not necessarily true.
So far, the state-run exchanges have taken federal money totaling more than a billion dollars...and many of them are having the same problems as Healthcare.gov.
From CBS News:
A CBS News analysis shows that the 15 states that opted to set up their own exchanges are spending more than $1.1 billion to launch and implement their own websites, often paying the same government contractors to do the same job in different states.
California has dedicated $359 million, while New York is spending $161 million. In Kentucky it’s $100 million, and in Oregon the price tag is $50 million.
The president has pointed to Oregon, which has enrolled 56,000 people in Medicaid – to argue things are working. “That’s 56,000 more Americans who now have health care,” the president has said. “That doesn’t depend on a website.”
And it’s a good thing, because Oregon’s website doesn’t work. The new Medicaid enrollments came through the mail. The state website has yet to enroll a single person.
What's worse is that five states which built their own sites hired CGI Federal - the same, disastrous, company tasked with building Healthcare.gov. So, it looks like you may have contributed your hard earned tax dollars to pay CGI Federal five different times, across multiple states, for essentially the same code. ...which we now know doesn't work.
I'd say this is "unbelievable" but at this point, it's what we've come to expect from Obama's fiasco.
