Study asserts misinformation surrounding connector site rollout
The alleged duplicity by state officials in the run-up to the disastrous rollout of a new Health Connector website in 2013 may have risen to the point of criminality, according to a Pioneer Institute study released Monday.
Drawing on the testimony of "whistleblowers" as well as regular audits of the website development, the think tank documented what it characterized as mismanagement and misdirection by the Patrick administration.
The failure of being able to connect individuals to health plans through a functional website compliant with the federal Affordable Care Act resulted in the state having to move 325,000 people onto temporary Medicaid plans.
"Our public officials not only were incompetent from a managerial perspective, but appear to have lied to the federal government to cover up mistakes made by both the state and CGI," Pioneer Senior Fellow Josh Archambault wrote. The study said state officials working on the health information exchange project may have violated federal laws, including the criminal statute punishing those who make false claims to the federal government with sentences of up to five years imprisonment.
Pioneer wrote to the FBI and other federal and state officials last October, making similar claims that state officials allegedly cheated on a March 2013 connectivity test and "vastly overstated" the amount of work completed in a May 2013 presentation to federal officials.
At the time, Kim Haberlin, a spokeswoman for Gov. Deval Patrick's special assistant on the health exchange project, dismissed the claims as politically motivated.
"Focusing on an intentionally misleading report from an organization that is fundamentally opposed to the Affordable Care Act and is re-hashing 16-month-old public documents for political gain six days before an election is a waste of time," Haberlin said at the time.
The U.S. Attorney's office in January subpoenaed the Baker administration for records dating to 2010 about problems with the Connector, according to Baker officials, and the administration says it is complying. The agency prosecutes criminal and civil cases.
After testifying before the Transportation Committee on Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker said he will definitely read the Pioneer report and he is focused on making sure the program works next fall.
"We inherited something I think everybody would agree is a bit of a basket case. Our goal is to get it to function. We have a re-enrollment coming up in September and open enrollment coming up in November. The people in Massachusetts are going to expect us to deliver on that," Baker said. "With respect to the rest of it, I'm trying very hard not to get too distracted by the past but to focus instead on making sure this thing works in the fall because the people of Massachusetts need it to work."
Glen Shor, who was the executive director of the Connector before becoming secretary of administration and finance and chairman of the Connector board starting in January 2013, did not respond to requests for comment. Shor is now vice president for finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Contractor CGI Technologies and Solutions Inc. missed multiple deadlines starting in the fall of 2012, about a year ahead of the website rollout date, and consultant BerryDunn regularly warned of problems with the development, the report stated.
"Meanwhile the media and the public were bombarded with positive messages urging Massachusetts residents to seek coverage when [Health Information Exchange] leaders knew many of those efforts would fail," the report said.
During the federal connectivity test, the state website developers "basically used a demo site" as their own work was incomplete, Archambault told the News Service.
Relying on unnamed whistleblowers, the report sketches a picture of a government agency where employees were well aware of an impending catastrophe.
"It's like when you're a kid and you do something wrong and you are waiting to be caught," the report quotes one whistleblower. "We were waiting for people to realize how bad this was."
Archambault told the News Service he had two primary sources at UMass Medical School, who both sought anonymity. One was one of the lead technical workers and the other worked in an administrative capacity sitting in on meetings with contractor CGI, according to Archambaut.
The whistleblowers' quotes add a more colorful perspective to the saga than the BerryDunn audits, which Archambault said were paid for by the state and regularly presented to those working on the website development.
"We called it UDT - Users Do Testing - because nothing had been tested ahead of the launch, it was a joke," a whistleblower is quoted as saying in the report.
Pioneer said a whistleblower described a "sense of dread," and said Janice Baker, a University of Massachusetts Medical School contractor who was assigned project manager for the new website, "ordered workers" to accept a substandard training manual, citing whistleblowers as the source of that information.
The report said CGI may have illegally been paid more than $50 million. The re-launched Connector website still has many issues that the report says the Baker administration estimates will cost at least $20 million to fix.
"We need a robust dose of transparency here for people to regain any sort of trust in the Connector," Archambault told the News Service.
Janice Baker took a new job outside of Massachusetts state government in mid-April though she remains on contract with the state to help with any transition needs through June, according to the administration. Scott Devonshire, who was chief information officer for the Connector, left that job last August.
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