New Massachusetts Obamacare Website to cost $121 Million .. The State will ask the Feds (That's You) to Pick up the Tab (Auto-on audio)

In a way, you can't Blame them. The State had a smooth running website until it had to integrate the Federal program into it. In fact, until It was integrated, it was a National Model of Efficiency.

Let's see now, $121 Million divided by 309 Million Americans equals around $0.39 each .. that's assuming everyone pays taxes .. OOPS!

The estimated price tag for ensuring that Massachusetts has a functioning health insurance website is $121 million, and, even then, consumers are unlikely to get a one-stop shopping experience this fall as they search for health plans, state officials said Thursday. 

Sarah Iselin, the insurance executive whom Governor Deval Patrick tapped to oversee repairs to the state’s broken Health Connector website, said Massachusetts intends to ask the federal government to pay for the fix. 

The state has already received $174 million in federal funds to build a site that is compliant with the federal health care law, but about a third of that money has been spent, and Iselin said the Patrick administration is sorting out how much of the remaining $117 million has been committed to pay contractors for work already done. 

The administration announced earlier this week that it plans to scrap its dysfunctional insurance website after deciding it would be too expensive and time-consuming to fix and to replace it with an off-the-shelf system used by several other states to enroll residents in plans. 

Simultaneously, the state is preparing to temporarily join the federal HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace in case the replacement system is not ready by the fall. 

Iselin told the Health Connector board Thursday that neither of the paths offers an ideal fix, and the federal option, in particular, will probably require the state to design a multistep online process so consumers could get the extra subsidies for health insurance coverage provided by state law.

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