In comments made last Friday, a day after the state disclosed that federal officials subpoenaed Health Connector records for as far back as 2010, Patrick told a group of MIT students that people have “got to be realistic that change is messy.”
“You try things, and people celebrate when you make the announcement, and then it goes sideways and they freak,” Patrick said, according to a post dated today on MIT’s news website. “And they’re encouraged to do so by a media which sensationalizes everything.”
He cited the Health Connector website failures as a “telling” example.
“The machine didn’t work. We added hundreds of thousands of people to health care while the machine didn’t work. But the story was ‘The machine doesn’t work,’” Patrick said. “Well, what was the point? To have a really cool website? Or to sign people up for health care?”
The Health Connector website’s failures have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. When people couldn’t enroll through the site, state officials were forced to put many on Medicaid as a stopgap measure without being able to determine whether they qualified for subsidized care.
Despite a complete overhaul, “hundreds” of problems remain, according to Gov. Charlie Baker, who has remade the Connector’s board, installed a new executive director and slammed the mess he inherited from the Patrick administration.
Federal prosecutors have since begun digging. A bombshell Pioneer Institute report, released Sunday night, claims the Patrick administration “vastly overstated” its progress in building the new website to avoid losing federal funds, hiding gaping holes in the portal to fool the feds.
Citing internal documents and whistleblower accounts from former project officials at UMass Medical School, who came forward in early 2014, Pioneer sent its findings in an October 2014 letter to the head of the FBI and other federal watchdog agencies. One of the whistleblowers told the Herald he already has been questioned by the FBI.
An MIT spokeswoman directed further questions to a Patrick aide, who do not return an email.
U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-South Boston) said today on Boston Herald Radio he was especially struck by one whistleblower’s allegations, reported in the Herald, that he was fired after objecting to several time-saving shortcuts proposed by website vendor CGI.
Said Lynch: “That is more egregious than willing ignorance, I guess.”
©2015 the Boston Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
