Maryland is scrapping most of its troubled health exchange website, replacing it with the same IT infrastructure Connecticut built to implement the Affordable Care Act. The state will pay contractor Deloitt Consulting $40 to $50 million to set up the framework that's worked in Connecticut.
The move makes Deloitt the third main contractor for Maryland's problem-plagued online marketplace. The state fired its first (Noridian Healthcare Solutions) and hired a second (Optum/QSSI) to fix ailing website. But in the end, the exchange board of directors decided that it would be cheaper to switch to a new system than to keep patching up the old one.
Maryland Health Secretary Joshua Sharfstein said the problems go back to an early bad call. "We went early on with a strategy of buying software that was fully built that could be configured for the challenge of the Affordable Care Act as opposed to other states, like Connecticut, which literally built it from the ground-up," he said.
Despite the problems, Maryland has exceeded its total goal for sign-ups.
