The state of Maryland has encountered many setbacks in its attempt to get a health care website up and running smoothly. (Sound familiar?) And now, it has run up the white flag. As Mary Pat Flaherty and Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post report:
… [Maryland] officials are set to replace the state’s online health-insurance exchange with technology from Connecticut’s insurance marketplace, according to two people familiar with the decision, an acknowledgment that a system that has cost at least $125.5 million is broken beyond repair.
One of those officials would, of course, be the state’s governor, Martin O’Malley, a self effacing man who recently announced, after a fashion, that he might very well be running for President, even if that means taking on Hillary Clinton in a campaign for his party’s nomination. Not quite two months ago, when:
Asked whether he thought he would be a good president, O’Malley said, “Yes, I think I would be, for these times especially.”
As John Wagner of the Washington Post, wrote at the time, O’Malley:
… cited his adherence to “a new way of leadership in our country,” including the statistics-driven CityStat and StateStat initiatives he launched in Baltimore and Annapolis, respectively, to measure the performance of government agencies.
“It is very much a way of leadership that’s more collaborative, that’s much more open, that is performance-measured, that is much more interactive, and it is the new way of leadership in the information age,” he said. “I believe in my bones that this is the future.”
“It is very much a way of leadership that’s more collaborative, that’s much more open, that is performance-measured, that is much more interactive, and it is the new way of leadership in the information age,” he said. “I believe in my bones that this is the future.”
The present, however, is less splendid for people in Maryland where, as the governor says:
… we have been changing the flat tires on this rolling car for the last five, going on six months now. And it has gotten better with every new fix applied to it, [but it is] still not working as it was supposed to work.”
