DURHAM, Ore. — After months of trying to get its problem-plagued online health exchange to work, Oregon on Friday gave up on the state portal and decided to switch to the federal website — the first state in the nation to do so.
Cover Oregon’s board approved an advisory committee’s recommendation to ditch its troubled portal. Oregon will now use HealthCare.Gov for private policies.
Officials say fixing the existing system would be too costly at $78 million and would take too long. Switching to the federal system would cost just $4 million to $6 million.
Oregon’s exchange was considered the worst in the dozen or so states that developed their own online health insurance marketplaces. The public could not use its website to sign up in one sitting.
Instead, there was a time-consuming hybrid paper and online process to sign up for insurance — despite $134 million the state paid Oracle Corp. to build the online exchange.