Maryland’s Costly Health-Care Blunder

THERE’S NOW a preliminary price tag on Maryland’s failure to roll out a functional health-insurance Web site: $5 million to $10 million. That’s an estimate of how much it will cost the state to offer emergency health coverage to people who couldn’t sign up on Maryland’s online Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace before Jan. 1. Extending last-minute coverage to these people is the right thing to do. But it’s not a substitute for a working Web site, nor for holding the state’s leaders to account.

For months, Marylanders have encountered error after error when trying to use theMaryland Health Connection, which was supposed to serve as their primary interface with the ACA. One bug gave definition to the word infuriating, freezing the site just as users were about to click the “enroll” button. The number of people who managed to sign up for private insurance through the marketplace has just surpassed 20,000, and that relatively low figure came only after recent site improvements resulted in a late increase in enrollments. It is also very far from the state’s goal of 150,000 sign-ups by the end of March.

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