Related: States Agree CGI Computer Software Sucks
That's why you.... give them a reward and pat on the back?
"Deal reached on botched Mass. health site; State will pay developer CGI additional $35m; Coakley is investigating company’s actions" by Felice J. Freyer | Globe staff June 20, 2014
Massachusetts agreed Friday to pay $35 million to the Canadian technology developer that created the botched health insurance website, which the state abandoned last month.
See: State Scraps Health Website
Counting $17 million already paid last year to the company, CGI, the state’s bill will total $52 million for a site that malfunctioned from the start when it launched last October.
I wish I could get paid millions for complete and utter failure!
State officials said the deal will ensure an orderly end to CGI’s work for the state, avoid litigation, and pay for the company’s assistance in recent months and its contributions to a replacement website.
What, no warranty?
“This is a pragmatic way to wind up a frustrating relationship,” Governor Deval Patrick said in a statement. “CGI has been a disappointing partner. This agreement resolves intellectual property issues so that we can move forward in building a website that works.”
Yeah, let's just forget about your failed legacies as you hit the door!
In addition to this we have DCF, Dookhan, Bridgewater, heroin crisis, casinos in our future, and I'm sure I'm leaving a few out as the list gets longer each day!
Yeah, it's pragmatic because it is not his money paying the bill!
Meanwhile, Attorney General Martha Coakley said Friday that her office had opened an investigation of CGI under the state’s Fair Claims Act. The agreement with CGI allows her office to seek up to $12 million, depending on the findings of an investigation into whether the company sought payment for services it did not deliver.
That's all we can get back? So we are already out $40 million for a software program that was a pos that destroyed the state website?
“The failings of the CGI-developed website have been unacceptable,” said Coakley’s spokesman, Brad Puffer, “and we are conducting an investigation into their actions to seek to recover money back for taxpayers.”
Why do I view that in the context of the campaign now? Where she been?
The troubles with the Massachusetts Health Connector’s website prevented thousands of consumers from enrolling in subsidized health plans last fall and winter, though many were later given temporary coverage through the state Medicaid program.
The Connector announced in March that it planned to terminate its contract with CGI and hire another health technology firm, Optum, to repair the website. But last month it scrapped the effort to fix the site, saying it would take too long, and instead decided to buy off-the-shelf software from another company.
Why couldn't they have done that at first? What well-connected concerns worked at CGI to get this overpriced contract?
The state’s original contract with CGI, plus supplemental work orders, called for it to pay the company $89 million to build the Connector website, $37 million more than the company will now get.
Yeah, we saved some money!
The agreement with CGI, signed Friday, set a transition period through Sept. 12 during which CGI will continue work on eligibility and enrollment software for MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, share its knowledge, and consult on maintaining, improving, and running the new system.
Please tell me the reporter was laughing and giggling when they typed that.
Who is going to ask the guy who f***ed it up what to do next?
CGI kept intellectual property rights to its work but freed its employees from any restrictions on going to work for the Connector. Neither side admitted to wrongdoing, and both agreed not to sue.
Why would the state have to admit wrongdoing? WTF kind of agreement is this?
WE WERE SOLD A $HIT PRODUCT! How is it OUR FAULT?
Linda Odorisio, CGI’s vice president of global communications, said in a statement, “This agreement recognizes the important contributions made by CGI throughout the project and during the past three months, when hundreds of CGI professionals stayed on the job to help the Commonwealth clear its [enrollment] backlog, improve functionality, and prepare for a new deployment plan.”
?????????????
These guys really think their shit don't stink.
Joshua Archambault — a senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, a Boston public policy think tank — called the agreement “a political deal, more than anything else.”
“CGI will remain, the state can hire any of CGI’s workers, and they’re going to continue to work at MassHealth,” he said. “Taxpayers will pay an additional $52 million with little to show for it, and there’s no public accountability.”
Welcome to Ma$$achu$hitts.
In a conference call Friday, Maydad Cohen, a special adviser to the governor who is leading the website repairs, said that $20 million of the CGI payment would go for “services rendered since November,” including still-needed software components that CGI built and its continuing work with Optum. “They’ve been working for free for nearly eight months,” Cohen said.
WTF? Don't they stand behind their product?
The remaining $15 million will pay for “work they’ve done keeping the lights on” at the Connector since March, as well as knowledge CGI has agreed to share over the next few weeks. Those payments will be made only as tasks are completed.
The website doesn't work and was scrapped!!
WTF?!! I can see why they announced this on a Slow Saturday!
“There were deficiencies and shortcomings on our part and on CGI’s part,” Cohen said. “Today’s agreement allows us to close a difficult chapter.”
The ONLY DEFICIENCY I SEE is STATE OVERSIGHT!
And look at them want to SWEEP it UNDER the RUG so you FORGET ALL ABOUT being FLEECED!
All the money is drawn from $174 million in federal grants the state received to retool its existing site to meet requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The state had spent $65 million of that money, and Friday’s agreement will bring expenditures to $90 million.
But the agreement does little to clarify how much it will cost the state to dig out from the website debacle.
You mean it is going to cost austerity-lashed taxpayers even more?
Doubting the site could be fixed in time for this fall’s sign-up period for 2015 coverage, the Connector announced last month that it would pursue a “dual track,” adapting off-the-shelf software from a Virginia firm while preparing to use the federal HealthCare.gov site for one year.
Oh, no. Not healthcare.gov. That's how this whole mess began!
The cost of the dual track was estimated at roughly $121 million by state officials.
That's more than twice what CGI was given for a $hit product!
Connector board chairman Glen Shor said last week that the Connector had identified $40 million in federal grant money that could be “repurposed” to pay for website repairs. On Friday, he said the $37 million savings from the CGI contract had been included in that amount.
Leaving only $3 million for all the rest of this. Like pi$$ in a cup.
Senator James T. Welch, a West Springfield Democrat who chairs the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, said he could not immediately assess whether the contract buyout was worth the price, but he welcomed this milestone in the process.
“It’s a positive step in terms of finally being able to move forward,” he said.
Yeah, ju$t forget about the anal rape and move on!
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And don't let the downed website get you down, Ma$$achu$hitts ding-dongs:
"Poll finds enduring support for Mass. health law; Most undeterred by website failures" by Felice J. Freyer | Globe Staff June 16, 2014
The strong public support for the Massachusetts health care law has not wavered, despite the well-publicized troubles of the state’s new health insurance website, a new poll has found.
So I'm told by the agenda-pushing paper!
Sixty-three percent of adults said they support the law, which is intended to ensure that almost everyone has health insurance — the same percentage as in a similar survey conducted in 2011. Both polls were conducted by the Boston Globe and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Fewer than half the people questioned in the latest survey knew anything about the difficulties with the state’s health insurance website after it was retooled to comply with the federal Affordable Care Act, starting last October.
That is what ruined it. Thanks, Obummer.
And the citizens of my state are ignoramuses? In Ma$$achu$hitts?
:-(
The site often was down, and when it worked, consumers could not determine their eligibility for government-subsidized coverage and experienced other problems, forcing some to go without coverage temporarily and use paper workarounds.
But we love it!
The results show that the Massachusetts health insurance law, enacted in 2006, is an entrenched and accepted part of life in the state, said Robert J. Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard and the poll’s codirector.
That's the agenda they are pushing here. Obummercare must be under mortal threat on the campaign trail.
Given the recent website troubles, Blendon said, “It would have been a real possibility in my mind that support for the law would have been substantially lower. . . . People are still incredibly supportive of the law.”
Ann Hurd is among the supporters, despite her firsthand experience with the balky website when she applied for health insurance in December.
“You weren’t able to get through to anything,” said Hurd, a poll respondent who agreed to answer follow-up questions from a reporter. “You’re just stuck there. You try like a week or two later and they get you to the next step. Then you were stuck there.”
Like one of the herd!
Eventually, Hurd was able to learn the premium prices, which approached $500 a month, more than she said she could afford from her pay as a baker. Hurd, 39, of North Attleborough, joined the shrinking group of Massachusetts residents who are uninsured.
But still, she approves of the law. “I support it,” she said. “I don’t support the price.”
Wait until you get the tax penalty bill.
Glen Shor, chairman of the board and former executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector Authority, the agency carrying out the health law, said he was not surprised by the survey results.
“The people of Massachusetts have long been supportive of ensuring that all residents of the Commonwealth are insured. That support has been enduring,” he said, “even during an intensive and raucous political debate over national health care reform.”
Simply showing, as the Founding Fathers said in the Declaration if Independence, that all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
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I find nothing more sickening than my fellow citizens believing the myths they are told about themselves, or the bull$hit poll extolling such. Sorry.
