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What if the “spike” in HealthSource reflects job loss and the tidal wave of Medicaid is permanent and swelling?
Rhode Island’s Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”) health benefits exchange lost 5,027 members (18.6%) as of the December 31 deadline for open enrollment. Officials largely blame the withdrawal of UnitedHealthcare’s plans:
HealthSource RI said in a statement that the “main driver” of the enrollment decline was the departure from the market of UnitedHealthcare, which HealthSource RI estimated insured roughly 1,400 exchange customers in 2016.
One source of lost customers was more significant, however: Medicaid. A HealthSource spokesperson tells the Current that “about 1500 individuals who had [qualified health plan] coverage at the start of Open Enrollment have since been determined eligible and enrolled in Medicaid.” A request for the number of Medicaid recipients who went the other way — losing the taxpayer-funded welfare benefit and signing up for a paid (if taxpayer subsidized) plan — had received no reply as of this writing.
Since the beginning of HealthSource RI and the related Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has warned that the system was designed to draw Rhode Islanders toward welfare benefits and dependence on government. From the beginning, new Medicaid enrollment has far exceeded the numbers of Rhode Islanders who have used the exchange to purchase insurance.
These decisions and results have been a significant part of Rhode Island’s drop to 48th in the country on the Center’s Jobs & Opportunity Index (JOI) and to 39th on the index’s Freedom Factor, which is the ratio of jobs and employment to reliance on welfare programs.
On WPRI, Susan Campbell and Shaun Towne personalize the latest example of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project’s (UHIP’s) glitchiness:
Since its launch in September, the $364-million United Health Infrastructure Project – or UHIP – has been plagued with problems, including two separate outages on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Thursday, a Pawtucket woman told Target 12 her husband’s citizenship status was changed in the system, suddenly claiming he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
What’s amazing to me about all this is that I’m completely and utterly anti-UHIP (aka RIBridges) as a functional project. The fact that it’s still not functional is just astounding, and I’m not really sure how to react.
Perhaps things are different in other parts of the state, but it has seemed that the new Dept. of Transportation (DOT) signs displaying their proud green on-time-and-on-budget dots are mostly planted around relatively small paint jobs. Painting’s important, of course, but the metaphor of bragging about it is too appropriate to let slide.
Within the first two pages of today’s Providence Journal, for example, we learn of DOT’s botching the roll-out of a temporary lane change, causing untold damage to the Rhode Island economy and the continued travails for people on public assistance after the botched roll-out of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). Now add in Nick Domings’s reporting for WPRI about “Dozens of dams in RI deemed unsafe“:
Dozens of dams in Rhode Island are in rough shape. In fact, dozens of them are in high-risk areas, and failure could cause death and catastrophic damage, according to the R.I. Department of Environmental Management.
To be fair, some of these dams are privately owned, but if we’re going to give government the role of inspecting and regulating even private infrastructure, it should be doing so (rather than the myriad other tasks government sets for itself). More importantly, can anybody have confidence in the people who run state government to handle a real catastrophe? If they can’t manage even a simple lane change, planned well in advance, and if $364,000,000 and years of preparation aren’t enough for it to implement new a software system smoothly, why should we expect that state government will do anything but make matters worse when something really bad happens unexpectedly?
A comment from Raymond Carter comes to mind both as a wake-up call and a warning:
The (very sad) truth is that sane crooks like Murphy, Paiva-Weed, Gina, Paolino, Mattiello and DeSimone will be a fond memory once the progressive crazies take over the asylum. Get ready for $100,000 babysitters with state pensions. Get prepared for Venezuelan style government, economics and collapse.
And in the face of all of this, Rhode Islanders remain poorly informed and apathetic.
The tone of Richard Salit’s Providence Journal article about HealthSource RI’s unsustainable business model is actually less pro-government-spending than one might have expected. Funding Rhode Island’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange while providing adequate customer service is presented as a challenge to be solved, perhaps with some mix of increased revenue and innovations in efficiency:
As it weans itself off of millions of dollars in federal start-up money, HealthSource has downsized significantly, and it is struggling to meet customer service demands as it approaches the start of its third-annual open enrollment period on Sunday.
Anya Rader Wallack, director of Health-Source until she leaves on Monday for a new job, acknowledges the difficulties.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t hear some complaints,” said Wallack, who called the restructuring “very much a work in progress.” “It’s not always pretty,” said Wallack. “We know that, as we have scaled back significantly at the call center to live within this budget, we’ve seen the impact on our customers … We are trying to do everything we can to address that situation. We hope to be much further through the re-engineering before open enrollment hits.”
But even without the Darth Vader music lingering around the mentions of budget cuts, the whole story isn’t being told. Namely, that this is no surprise whatsoever. A 2009 study conducted under now-Secretary of Health and Human Services Elizabeth Roberts found that Rhode Island simply doesn’t have the scale to justify this sort of a government program.
Unless people are (1) forced to buy insurance and (2) forced to do so through the government exchange, it just doesn’t make sense for the state to operate a Web site like this, and making a business model work in a way that restricts freedoms should not in any terms be within the government’s scope.
That’s why Rhode Islanders should find it offensive, presumptuous, and dangerous that a recent PowerPoint presentation promoting the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) talks about “capturing” markets. That phrase appears as a marker of success for HealthSource, which is the precursor for the RIBridges project, which will link all government services in an easy-get-hand-outs network, but it’s not success; it’s an affront.
Capturing markets is an appropriate activity for private organizations, because what they mean is that they’re offering products that people increasingly want and voluntarily procure. Government can manipulate the law and the economy in order to drive people to its products. That’s not competition; it’s totalitarianism and an assault on freedom.
RI Governor Lincoln Chafee’s claim to independence at the Democrat National Convention doesn’t jibe with his lunge toward President Obama’s larger welfare intention with health benefit exchanges.
The campaign manager for President Donald Trump, Brad Parscale, offered a take on the Democrats’ Iowa caucus troubles that probably occurred simultaneously to just about every conservative in the country:
And these are the people who want to run our entire health care system?
A point often gets lost in all the jockeying for control of the American narrative. When we object to this program or that one, conservatives aren’t typically opposing government-driven solutions regardless of whether they’ll work. On the flip side, we also aren’t typically saying that the certainty of a fix can always overcome principled objections based on a philosophy of how government should function.
Rather, the conservative position tends to be that, for any given issue, the trade offs are not sufficiently clear, the benefits are not sufficiently certain, and side effects are so excessively probable that humility should be the underlying principle.
The debacle of the 2020 Iowa caucus should be more proof than anybody needs of this principle. It’s not as if this was the first time Iowa Democrats have caucused, but now (regardless of the reason) there will be lingering doubts about the process, including discord between factions that suspect some sort of political scheme.
To be sure, government and political parties will naturally handle elections-related activities, but they don’t have to handle things like healthcare. Look at experience with the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). When bureaucrats committed Rhode Island to the scheme during the Chafee administration, they had wide eyes about “one-stop shopping” for government services. When they rushed ahead with a system that they’d been warned was not ready, no doubt the Raimondo administration was hoping for some sort of PR win. And we got… a debacle.
This isn’t a claim that Democrats are especially incompetent, but that our political system creates incentives and risks that should advise a strong preference for handling society’s challenges through other institutions than government.
Back in the sunny days before many people had even heard about the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), let alone before it was a byword for the Ocean State’s dysfunctional government, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity was warning about a “dependency portal.”
The idea behind the system is that state government will consolidate the information it collects for every type of welfare benefit and program it operates. That information would be updated in an ongoing way, and people will automatically receive any benefits for which they are newly eligible.
Of course, the flip side is that people would also automatically lose any benefits for which they are no longer eligible. Moreover, nobody should believe that politicians and bureaucrats would not find other uses for this treasure trove of information.
Turn, now, to Elizabeth Brico’s commentary on Talk Poverty:
… after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.
When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.
Admittedly, I get the impression I wouldn’t agree with some of Brico’s broader assumptions and prescriptions, but empowering a faceless bureaucratic system to intervene intimately in people’s lives based on cold data is a frightening idea on its face.
Rhode Island tourism appears to be having some success with its “fun-sized” series of ads, and the branding idea also provides opportunity for political commentary — as with Mike Riley’s quip about “fun-sized taxes.”
Surprisingly, though, I haven’t yet seen the adjective applied to the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). As has been widely reported, the state government is planning to spend another $156 million on the project, bringing the total up to $648 million:
In a request to the U.S. government for federal money to pay the bulk of finishing the computer system, the R.I. Executive Office of Health and Human Services this week said its new Unified Health Infrastructure Project budget “reflects the necessary personnel and contracted staff to support enterprise-wide efforts to move the system towards compliance and to address mission-critical operational concerns.”
In other words, despite two years of emergency troubleshooting since the biggest piece of the project went live, the technology still isn’t working as designed, and Gov. Gina Raimondo’s administration is planning for another year of development work, plus ongoing maintenance and operations.
So what is “fun-sized,” here — the budget or the lines of people that we’ve seen waiting for government services? One could envision videos for both possibilities: In one, the camera starts zoomed in on a pile of money and then zooms out to the entire cost for this non-functional software; in the other, it zooms in on a couple of people talking and then zooms out to the entire line of people wasting their day trying to correct problems with payments from the government.
Neither of those videos will be produced, though. In contrast, Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo has a big, big campaign budget and is producing lots of targeted videos. Out-of-state donations have long donated the governor’s funding stream, with non-Rhode Island donors contributing 66% of the money she raised during the second quarter of this year.
We’ll see if out-of-state interest in our governor is enough to buy her another term despite her presiding over this massive debacle (among others).
As a UHIP skeptic from the very first time it was mentioned as a possibility, I continue to think that everybody is following the wrong storyline. However, increased scrutiny is starting to bring people around to the right questions… the correct angle. Consider:
As to why so many things went wrong, [Deloitte manager Deborah] Sills said: “Simply put, the system is very complex … the only eligibility system in the country that integrates more than 10 state and federal health and human services programs and a state based health insurance exchange … As the state’s comprehensive analysis last year made clear, Deloitte and the state needed ‘more time, more people and more training.'”
GoLocalProv has posted the entire 40-page, paper-and-pen application that goes along with the half-billion-dollar computer system, and what’s becoming clearer is that the state simply expected too much from software, hoping to avoid the hard work of reconceptualizing how benefits programs are done. In this light, the fundamental error of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo was her failure to understand the nature of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). It was never really intended to be a cost-savings and efficiency tool, but rather a dependency portal, drawing people into government programs and maximizing the amount of “services” that the state could hire people to provide.
Look at the application. The complexity comes in because each program requires different information. That’s not a terrible problem if the applicant knows which one he or she wants, but the entire point of UHIP is to give people things they aren’t applying for, so the application asks for all of the possible information. Streamlining that would require regulatory and legislative changes, some of it at the federal level.
In order to effectuate those changes, advocates would have to make clearer the underlying objective, and that would run contrary to the plan. The dependency portal is meant to insinuate itself into reality under the banner of efficiency, which the public would actually support. Less popular would be a banner proclaiming, “We want to ensure that everybody gets every penny of taxpayer money possible, even without looking for it.” Even less popular would be, “We want to track everybody’s personal and financial information so that we can adjust their benefits automatically.”
The court-appointed “special master” tasked with getting Rhode Island’s Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) working, Deming Sherman, tells Kate Nagle of GoLocalProv that the system is flawed:
“It (UHIP) was not a bad idea, but bad execution,” said Sherman about UHIP. The good idea of UHIP was to tie five distinct programs together, but the flaws have been that the vendor, Deloitte and the workforce did not work and were not trained, respectively. Just as the UHIP program was being implemented the state laid off key workers. Since then DHS has had a difficult time training and retain workers for the program.
Sherman said the UHIP system has two problems technology and the workforce that operates it.
The surface reaction one has to this is to be incensed that the state government has already spent roughly a half-billion dollars on the system. Nobody forced state government to undertake a project that it was not competent to oversee. In fact, the state barely conducted public discussion before jumping in. Bureaucrats under former Democrat Governor Lincoln Chafee simply went forward as if it was the obvious thing to do.
Similarly, nobody forced Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo to manage her personnel under the assumption that flipping the switch on UHIP would instantly bring a new day. She took a big, big gamble, attempting to make budgetary room for other things, like her crony capitalist approach to economic development, and the state’s vulnerable populations have suffered for it.
More deeply, though, we should challenge Sherman’s statement that the concept was sound. The goal of UHIP, which was pushed down from activists at the national level (with the encouragement of Democrat Congressman David Cicilline), is to draw people into dependency on government. The system has the 40-page application about which Sherman complains in part because the designers want it to collect scads of information about people, which would be constantly updated on the pretense of regularly checking eligibility.
If it weren’t for the human suffering and loss of opportunity that it’s causing, we should actually be happy that UHIP isn’t working, which is a sad statement on the condition of our democracy. Being saved from insidious ideas by managerial incompetence is not a silver lining that ought to inspire confidence or hope.
The latest UHIP debacle provides a warning about what this system will look like when it’s fully operational:
The update caused the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) system to recheck the eligibility of applicants for the State Supplemental Payment program, and in cases where they were found to have been eligible for payments for a number of previous months, they were retroactively sent an individual check for each month. But no note was attached to explain why the identical checks had arrived.
Move past the scandal of the system’s not working and imagine what this looks like when it’s functional. People will automatically get checks, and they’ll automatically go up and down with their eligibility. That will be a very visible incentive for people not to earn money, because they’ll be accustomed to watching their benefit amounts go up and down.
The popularity of lotteries and raffles show that people can be irrational about money in this way. Just as people will shell out cash for an almost imaginary possibility of winning, they will sometimes give up the potential for more money when they see an existing income source reduced. Or they can learn the lesson the other way: After their work-related income goes down, they’ll see an automatic increase in welfare to help make up for it.
One suspects that the number of welfare recipients (or people, for that matter) who keep spreadsheets and line graphs of their total income to be relatively small, especially quantifying benefits that don’t necessarily come with an obvious dollar amount. Moreover, people will tend to put a thumb on the scale of their feelings when it comes to exchanging assistance for work to the extent that the jobs available to them aren’t the most exciting.
This is one of the many ways that UHIP will enhance the negative effects of a welfare state more than it gains taxpayers in efficiency.
Rhode Islanders who follow the news can’t help but begin wondering how many times the federal government will have to send letters of complaint against our corrupt and inept state government. The Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) is obviously the giant archetype of the problem, but even those blue RhodeWorks signs promoting Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo are an illustration. Here’s Patrick Anderson in the Providence Journal:
The Federal Highway Administration has found the hundreds of signs scattered over roads and bridges are “not in compliance” with federal traffic regulations, Carlos Machado, Federal Highway’s administrator for Rhode Island, said Wednesday. …
Nancy Singer, a Federal Highway spokeswoman, provided The Journal with the federal regulation at issue in Rhode Island, which does not allow “promotional or other informational signs regarding such matters as identification of public officials, contractors, organizational affiliations, and related logos and symbols.”
Also of interest is that the signs cost an extra $100 each to make and install, bringing the total to $52,000, because the original estimate didn’t include labor costs. Unionized state employees are both making and installing the signs.
Recall, in this context, that Raimondo’s Director of the Department of Transportation, Peter Alviti, was previously an employee of the Laborers’ International Union (LiUNA). Shortly after his hiring, Alviti scuttled a hiring plan that called for the state to bring in more design and development employees, as recommended by an expensive outside analysis, and instead hired more laborers. One effect of the change was that the new hires shifted from a different union to LiUNA.
Recall, also, that Alviti brought some tasks in-house, like road striping, claiming that having more union members on the payroll year round would be less expensive than hiring outside vendors for the part-year work.
Now we are reminded that the DOT has been finding work for its employees making overly political signs for the governor. At what point does the federal government stop the cease and desist letters and send in the investigators?
Ted Nesi and Susan Campbell report on the costly future of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP):
Two years after insisting Rhode Island’s new $445-million benefits system would pay for itself by next June, state officials now admit they have no idea if the problem-plagued computer system will ever save enough to cover its cost.
Folks still aren’t getting the bigger picture when it comes to costs. UHIP is designed to maximize the use of government services. Not only will it never cover its “costs,” but it will continue to increase public expenditures.
At some point in the future, some gubernatorial administration may announce that the system has stopped enough proverbial “waste, fraud, and abuse” to cover the expense of implementing the program, but we can be sure such a calculation will brush aside actual increases in spending on the programs.
Rather than simply update our operating systems for welfare programs, Rhode Island government officials chose to make the state an experiment in interweaving all programs for “one stop shopping.” We’re already paying the price, and it’s a bill that will continue to grow.
I’ve tried to get some follow-up information from Felicia Delgado, of the Parent Support Network of Rhode Island, regarding her testimony before the Rhode Island House Oversight Committee about the harm that a non-functional Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), otherwise known as RI Bridges, has done to Rhode Islanders’ lives:
Others have lost their jobs because of these lost benefits and UHIP-delayed payments from the state to long-term health-care facilities.
At least 20 people — she emphasized they didn’t prostitute previously and don’t have substance-abuse problems — have turned to prostitution to pay for rent, childcare and food and fend off homelessness. Delgado declined to identify the people.
Mostly, I’m interested to know if she’s seen any progress, but I also wanted to ask if she had information about how this happens as a functional matter. Did the people just know what street corners to hang out on? Did they use Craig’s List? Did they slip into an existing network, involving pimps? Or do they start with people whom they already know?
What’s striking is that prostitution would be a fall-back occupation for people who hadn’t done it before. Granted, it probably pays better than most other transactions for which people will pay unskilled entrants, but it comes with a high degree of risk and an appropriate social squeamishness.
UHIP is a problem and a blight all on its own, but a thriving economy without such a pervasive regime of regulations and licensing requirements would not only keep people from needing the services in the first place, but also give them other options when government messes up. Instead, Rhode Islanders suffer through this process of government micromanagement of our economy’s creating a lack of opportunity, which government attempts to fix with welfare programs. And when that doesn’t work… prostitution.
You may have read that the state government settled the lawsuit that the ACLU filed over the debacle of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP; aka RI Bridges, if it ever works). As I’ve asked before, was this necessary? Even assuming the state wouldn’t have taken the same steps that it has promised in the settlement once negative attention forced action, couldn’t a push from a few activist groups have produced the same result?
Well, mostly. This part of the settlement probably wouldn’t have been in the outcome of a simple petition:
Plaintiffs shall be entitled to recover their reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988. Within sixty (60) days of the Court’s entry of this Order as an order of the Court, Plaintiffs shall file a bill of costs and motion for attorneys’ fees and costs with the Court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988, unless such time is extended by agreement of the Parties or order of the Court or unless such motion is rendered unnecessary by agreement of the Parties. Prior to filing such motion, 13 Plaintiffs shall present a bill of costs and fees to Defendant and within fifteen (15) business days thereafter, or at such time as the Parties mutually agree upon, the Parties shall confer by telephone or in-person in a good faith effort to agree to an amount in settlement of fees and costs. If the Parties are unable to agree to a fee amount, Plaintiffs may file a motion for attorneys’ fees and costs with the Court.
Indeed, if a petition-driven resolution had included language promising money to the activists, it would have seemed shady. But in this case, to recap, the state is having trouble providing money and services to needy people, and some activist lawyers managed to make a payday of it while appearing to be warriors of charity. That’s government under a progressive regime, I guess.
Obviously, I agree with the thrust of the ACLU’s lawsuit against the state of Rhode Island over its poorly conceived and implemented Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). You don’t get much more anti-UHIP than me.
However, in the interest of asking questions nobody else is asking in order to keep us always thinking, I can’t help but wonder: What is the purpose of this lawsuit?
The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) announced Friday the details of a lawsuit it’s filed against the state over its new benefits eligibility system.
The class action lawsuit claims the state has failed to timely provide benefits to needy families due in part to its troubled transition to the Unified Health Infrastructure Project – otherwise known as UHIP.
Honest question: If the incentives of politics, pressure from the federal government, and basic human decency aren’t driving bureaucrats and elected officials from the State of Rhode Island to do everything they can to resolve these problems, why would the expense and distraction of a lawsuit from the ACLU make the difference? If the ACLU is simply piling on, the organization would arguably be making the problem worse.
Well, this raises some questions (emphasis added):
[RI House Fiscal leader Sharon Reynolds] Ferland expressed concern about how the troubled rollout of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), the state’s new $364-million computer system for benefits programs, will impact the budget going forward. She said her office has been unable to obtain its usual monthly enrollment reports since just before the system launched in September.
So the human services folks are claiming to be catching people who are ineligible, but they don’t have a total count? Honestly, how does an improvedly digital system fail to provide reports? That’s kind of like the key function of digital systems.
One suspects they’ve got reports, but that there are so many cases processed manually (and perhaps with so many adjustments having to be made to the automatic data) that they’ve got to figure out some way to combine their various sources.
What a mess.
… why should we be surprised that a state that can’t direct traffic, can’t implement a new DMV computer system for a decade, and can’t make a new $365,000,000 welfare program work out of the gate would be able to change voting technology without some glitches. So, as with the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) debacle, leaving people waiting in line for days and not receiving payments, we have people waiting in line to vote and having to leave their ballots in an open box. (That’s after a surprise week of heavy “early voting” during which no IDs were necessary.)
I’ve wondered whether the the state’s ruling elite finally allowed the elimination of the vote-for-one-party “master lever” option on the ballot because they were confident they had the whole electoral process more or less locked up anyway. If we’re going to have a system that’s rigged to the core — down to the fundamental assumption that government policy should be built around vote buying — we might as well have elections that feel like something out of a third-world country.
At least the nature of our government system will be unmistakable.
Aw, well, isn’t this a nice “things we choose to do together” government report?
Gov. Gina Raimondo and other state officials unveiled Skills for Rhode Island’s Future at a Bank of America call center in East Providence, which is hiring some new workers through the program.
That’s what people will take away, but what they should focus on is the background story that’s somewhat visible in the details:
The group’s IRS filings fill in the picture a bit. Between 2012 and 2014, its total revenue ranged from $3,316,498 to $3,943,121, with the better part coming from government. If the linked article above is correct that it has “found jobs for more than 3,100 people in Chicago,” the per-job cost is over $4,000.
I’ve written frequently about the idea of a “company state” model under which government becomes the central industry for an area (like the State of Rhode Island) and strives to expand the services that it can provide in order to justify confiscating money from disfavored groups in the area or in other states. Skills for Rhode Island’s Future is a great example.
With the federal government as its anchor client, the organization is expanding across the country like a franchise, spending copious amounts of money to make people feel dependent on government, acting as a recruiting contractor for connected companies and acting as an entry point for people’s reliance on government.
According to the office of Governor Raimondo, Skills for Rhode Island’s Future will not be interacting with state welfare offices or be plugged into the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) system, which would direct clients to any and all other government services for which they might qualify. That would be a relatively short step, though, once the organization is established.
As this system becomes entrenched and integrated, companies will have increasing incentive to play ball and get in on the scheme, while workers will have incentive to become the sorts of people whom the government and the corporations want them to be. Thus will more people be drawn through the dependency portal, leaving fewer who aren’t under the direct influence of and subject to reliance on government.
One is almost tempted to wonder if taxpayers will get a refund for this:
A former state employee has agreed to plead guilty to charges that he manipulated computer files kept by the Department of Labor and Training in a scheme that bilked the state’s unemployment insurance system of almost $500,000 in benefits, federal and state authorities said Thursday.
The former employee, Ambulai R. Sheku, 37, of Providence, an interviewer at the DLT, exploited his senior position to gain access to the department’s computer files and fraudulently obtain unemployment benefits for himself and co-conspirators, says information that federal prosecutors filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, in Providence.
Will the state budget go down a commensurate amount in the upcoming fiscal year, or is state government operate under Darwinistic rules of corruption whereby the discovery of one insider cheat means there’s more taxpayer money available for the others to take?
And by the way: With the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) linking every social service program in the state through one interface, how much larger are the possible scams and how much more difficult to spot the smaller ones?
Up to now, the blame attaching to the administration of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo for Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) failures was mitigated by the fact that its implementation and many of the related decisions predated her time in office and, as Kathy Gregg notes, because an outside contractor was responsible for the work. But this news raises questions about the ability of Rhode Island’s current governor to manage the state and its projects:
The Raimondo administration ignored strongly worded warnings from the federal government that its new $364-million benefits system wasn’t ready to launch last month, and officials put federal funding at risk by going ahead anyway, Target 12 has learned.
Reading the letters available through Target 12, it’s clear the federal government’s concerns were broad of scope, from criticism of an inadequate method of testing the new system to concerns that new staff intended to help with the roll-out had very little time for training and preparation.
Another matter that the letters bring to light is the degree of help that the Raimondo administration has had at its disposal. Not only has it utilized an outside contractor to put the system together, but the federal government is clearly available to help in a detailed, hands-on way. Where the state government had influence — in making decisions, such as the decision to go forward with implementation — it failed.
Making matters worse is the evidence of how the Raimondo administration handles its other core responsibility (other than actually running government): communicating with the public. Gregg points out that the Raimondo administration strove to keep these letters (and who knows what additional embarrassing information) from the Providence Journal. Even now, the administration is spinning more than clarifying. From the Target 12 link:
Brenna McCabe, a spokeswoman for the R.I. Department of Administration, reiterated that point in a statement on the federal letters, telling Target 12: “As you will see … FNS expressed concerns with the state’s plans, but at no time did they instruct us to stop the launch of the system on Sept. 13.”
The language of the letters is so strong that one would have to say the federal agents were all but telling the state to delay the project. With this spin, the Raimondo administration is like an 18-year-old girl attempting to deflect blame for some disaster because her parents only warned her in the strongest terms that what she was planning to do was a very bad idea.
As Ted Nesi reports, the state’s Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) goes live, today. Much of the focus has been the cost overruns to get the new software system active — nearing a half-billion dollars if the state gets approval from the federal government for some final additions. But Rhode Islanders should be disconcerted by the vagueness of the talk:
But in an interview last week, EOHHS Deputy Secretary Jennifer Wood was adamant that the next year of UHIP spending will come nowhere near $124 million. She described the amount as an opening bid in months of discussions with federal and state officials over how many additional tools should be added to the system. …
“This is an all-in, integrated system,” [Deputy Secretary of Administration Wayne] Hannon said. “It includes basically one-stop shopping for anybody who could be eligible for these services in the state of Rhode Island. I believe it’s the first … fully integrated system [in the country].”
That’s Rhode Island: first in the nation for cutting-edge government, even though our experience had been that it mainly cuts into the private sector, families’ independence, and our quality of life. What we should be asking is what kind of “tools” we’re talking about, here, especially since that cost is nearly what the state initially estimated for the entire project.
The bureaucrats are touting an expected reduction of improper payments, as the state is better able to determine actual eligibility, but the effect is likely to be opposite. There’s a reason they call it “one-stop shopping.” The idea is to ensure that nobody misses any benefits for which they’re eligible, even if they don’t know they need them. It’s part of the “company state” push by governments in blue states to make public services the central industry bolstering an area that has lost its ability to compete in the global market, for whatever reason.
Of course, being on the cutting edge of the next step in government domination means Rhode Islanders will have the privilege of providing data for other states in the future. So, we’ll have to wait and see whether the welfare roles decrease or increase, just as Medicaid enrollment shot up with the implementation of the health benefits exchange (HealthSource RI). Naturally, the disclaimer is that the state government will have a variety of methods (and a whole lot of incentive) to obscure the reason for any budget-busting increases.
Rhode Island won’t forever be able to avoid the arrival of the state’s Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) monster, although the latest from Lynn Arditi is that it won’t darken our state until the leaves begin to shade and the season of evil approaches in the fall (appropriate to an election season, this time around, too). It’s a sinister beast, too, this dependency portal, which weaves itself in sly language. Witness (emphasis added):
The new system will allow the state to verify eligibility for programs such as Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income residents, and integrate them with other state assistance programs, officials said, to improve service and weed out fraud. …
“Rhode Island has been running the same enrollment and eligibility software since the Reagan Administration,” Roberts said. “This new system is a smart investment that will result in better customer service and significant savings for state taxpayers. As we move toward the September launch, we will continue to incorporate best practices and lessons learned from other states. We are confident that setting a launch date in September will allow the state ample time to anticipate and prepare for any issues that may develop during a transition from an aging software system to a modern, digital portal that meets our 21st century needs.”
In our traditional understanding of such concepts, one does not “verify eligibility” to receive “customer service,” and the wise reader should expect that “significant savings” will be measured against what the costs would have been to expand benefits by some less-efficient route. That’s what UHIP is going to do. As with the expansion of Medicaid and its implementation through the ObamaCare health benefits exchange (which was the first key piece of the portal), “verifying eligibility” will not prove to mean stopping people who apply from receiving benefits inappropriately, but rather, verifying that people who didn’t know they were eligible and who were not really seeking benefits are indeed eligible and should indeed receive taxpayer dollars.
Like some magical being, efficiency of this sort can be a positive when it is pursued in the proper spirit. When the spirit is corrupted, though, efficiency merely accelerates the spreading of its dark shadow, particularly when the bureaucratic cult that summoned the beast has so mastered the technique of shaving its two pounds of flesh.
For the 2013 Freedom Index, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity highlighted legislation that was ultimately signed into law “to create a state-controlled electronic prescription database storing all information related to electronically distributed medical prescriptions.” We gave it a -2, and naturally the General Assembly passed it and Governor Lincoln Chafee signed it into law:
Well, surprise, surprise, legislators are in the process of expanding the reach of this database in newly invasive and frightening ways, and naturally the Senate passed the legislation last night, with only Republican Elaine Morgan (Charlestown, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond, West Greenwich) voting “nay.” This legislation will “empower the state Dept. of Health to combine its drug prescription database with any other source of data to analyze the behavior and personal connections of patients and pharmacists, under the pretense of finding abuse”:
Add this database to the information that will be produced by gantry-based tolling systems and license-plate readers looking for the uninsured, and then mix in the comprehensive data to be collected by the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) and that which is already collected for taxation and other economic activity, and everybody in Rhode Island will have a frighteningly complete digital profile accessible to unaccountable bureaucrats, following the lead of a gang of elected officials best known for violating ethics rules and being investigated by the feds.
One could easily lose track of all of the mounting costs that Rhode Island’s ruling class is piling on our future.
We’ve got such things as the Medicaid expansion, of course, which will soon receive another boost — along with every other welfare program — when the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP) is fully operational and ensuring that every conceivable recipient is receiving the maximum handout. We’ve got the state’s pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) costs, which will be exploding in the near-to-mid-term future. In a year or two, there will be tolls on trucks, and we can be sure that they will be followed by tolls on cars. And all of this comes on top of the increases in taxes, fees, and costly mandates and regulations that slip through the General Assembly into law each and every year.
And then there’s Deepwater Wind, about which Ian Donnis provides a reminder on Rhode Island Public Radio’s site, today. This part can only lead to shaking heads:
“No one can predict the future,” [Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski] said. “I know what the cost of the Block Island wind farm will be, because I can predict that going forward. But where the rest of the market is, is completely unknown today — and it’s unpredictable. So those projections of what an over-market cost might be are simply speculation at this point.”
This rationale, from somebody deeply and personally invested in this particular special interest, should be a candidate for the best articulation of Rhode Island government’s wrong-headed approach to economic development. Hey, whether our investments are good or bad is “simply speculation,” right? That’s why the people who stand to benefit directly had to get the state government to force everybody else to pay for it.
This is exactly the problem with what some have called “venture socialism.” Private interests make out one way or another, and the public absorbs all of the risk. Politicians who supposedly represent you and me shouldn’t be committing us to “speculation.” Donnis closes the article as follows:
So does this wind power represent a smart investment or a corporate giveaway that will lead to higher bills for electricity? The answer to that question may not be known for many years.
I have yet to see anybody estimate or even describe the upside in concrete terms, but the downside is easy to see, even if we don’t include systematic costs like turning state government into a form of organized crime for theft on a mind boggling scale.
As a follow-on to my Watchdog column, this week, Megan McArdle’s thoughts on the Democrats’ electoral fate in the Obama Era raise a telling point, from a Rhode Island point of view:
Many of [ObamaCare’s] subsequent struggles have stemmed from the apparent belief that [Democrats] didn’t need down-ticket races, or public opinion; all they needed was Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office.
Kentucky illustrates the dangers of this strategy. Most policy happens at the state and local level, not federal, something that’s easy to forget as local media outlets fail and news coverage becomes increasingly focused on national elections. Under outgoing Democratic governor Steve Beshear, Kentucky was a poster child for the success of Obamacare; under incoming governor Matt Bevin, it may well become a poster child for its failure.
Sitting here in the Democrat-run Ocean State, I’d caution McArdle not to be overly skeptical of the strategy. Our state’s health benefits exchange (also created by questionable executive order) lived off federal funding and administrative changing of the law for development and a couple of years of operations. Now, it looks likely to survive by being embedded in the larger Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), for which the federal government has largely paid.
HealthSource is a good example of the Rhode Island reality that, if the federal government can find a way to pay for it, state policymakers will go along. The lesson may have limited application across a large, diverse country, but it is an indication of what the Left will strive to do with its control of the federal bureaucracy, judiciary, and whichever elective offices it can win.
For our part, Rhode Islanders should take it as a point of personal shame that our state and our liberties are so easily bought.
Another issue on which the Raimondo administration prefers total secrecy is the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), which is designed to rope Rhode Islanders into government benefits and which has gone way over its initial budget with no public debate and little public awareness.
Cost overruns for the state’s Unified Health Infrastructure Project (the “dependency portal”) should bring public scrutiny to the dangerous policy that the project seeks to implement.
Pam Gencarella has a good article on GoLocalProv, describing some of the ways Rhode Island’s handout programs seem always to cost more than expected. As she says, the state’s ObamaCare health benefits exchange, HealthSource RI, is “not much more than a big advertising campaign for Medicaid and its expansion.” The state’s Medicaid expenses prove the point, with the November revised estimate adding $211 million (10%) in costs.
Meanwhile, despite the exchange’s offering thousands of people subsidized health insurance and more than one-quarter of the state on Medicaid (not to mention Medicare), the bill for uncompensated care is up 16%, to $137 million.
Gencarella also brings up the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), which is designed to cascade all government handout programs to those who qualify for any of them. Her focus is on the budgetary effects of UHIP’s intent, but even the cost of the program massive. According to Pam, “the total projected cost for this project is $229 million.”
If I may throw another log on the fire, as I noted in last year’s Spotlight on Spending report, UHIP was projected, at that time, to cost $209 million. There’s another mysterious 10% increase!
Really, Rhode Island, we have to make this stop.