WaPo: Maryland Democrats knew #Obamacare state exchange launch wouldn’t work.

This Washington Post article starts bad for the O’Malley administration…

More than a year before Maryland launched its health insurance exchange, senior state officials failed to heed warnings that no one was ultimately accountable for the $170 million project and that the state lacked a plausible plan for how it would be ready by Oct. 1.

Over the following months, as political leaders continued to proclaim that the state’s exchange would be a national model, the system went through three different project managers, the feuding between contractors hired to build the online exchange devolved into lawsuits, and key people quit, including a top information technology official because, as he would later say, the project “was a disaster waiting to happen.”

…and it never particularly gets any better for them, either.  One reads this article with mixed emotions: on the one hand, it describes an unmitigated disaster that ended in screaming, wild accusations, ongoing lawsuits, and quite a lot of pain for quite a lot of innocent people*. On the other hand? I didn’t do it. Heck, I am one of the people who told them that the sites weren’t going to work. Continue reading WaPo: Maryland Democrats knew #Obamacare state exchange launch wouldn’t work.

Maryland’s clown-show gubernatorial Democratic primary heats up. #Obamacare

This is going to be a gloriously ugly primary campaign

Washington has been locked for months in a series of partisan battles over the law known as Obamacare, as well as battles within the GOP over how best to oppose the ACA. But it’s the state just to the north that has served up the country’s first Democrat-on-Democrat brawl over the inept implementation of the law, offering perhaps a first test of Democratic voters’ patience with the ACA’s technical setbacks.

In Maryland, the fight to succeed outgoing Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley has pitted [Attorney General Doug] Gansler against state Del. Heather Mizeur and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, the frontrunner for the nomination who chairs the state panel on ACA implementation and has long presented himself as the O’Malley administration’s point man on Obamacare.

Continue reading Maryland’s clown-show gubernatorial Democratic primary heats up. #Obamacare