Oregon Withholding $25.6M From Oracle Over Health Website Woes

itwbennett writes "Oregon is holding back $25.6 million in payments from Oracle (out of some $69.5 million Oracle claims it is owed) over work the vendor did on the state's troubled health care exchange website. The site was supposed to go live on Oct. 1 but its launch has been marred by a slew of bugs and it is not yet fully functional. This week, Cover Oregon said it had reached an agreement with Oracle laying out 'an orderly transition of technology development services, and protects current and future Cover Oregon enrollees,' according to a statement. Oregon officials reached the deal with Oracle after the company reportedly threatened to pull all of its workers off the project and essentially walk away."

Re:Good if they succeed.

[Archangel Michael]

You are only PARTIALLY correct. The "Public Sector Services" part is designed to enslave voters to a single party so that any "cuts" (by cuts, we mean slowing growth of programs) becomes a sledgehammer to bang over the head of the other party.

Meanwhile our governments are going into further and further debt, maintaining services that are often overlapping by 10-12 times with other "public services" and there is no will or even intention of ever cutting out the cruft.

And make not mistake, the lining of politician's pockets occurs with "Big Government Contracts" that aren't "privatization", these are no-bid contracts, public works projects that provide "bridges to nowhere".

IF all you see is the otherside being the problem, you're part of the problem yourself. Until we get past (D) good, (R) bad (or visa versa) there will be no solution to the ongoing nightmare called "government".

Re:Reinvent the wheel much?

[Obfuscant]

Well some states purposely wanted to balloon the costs, or make the law look like a failure (hey look at what those dems cost us)

The President of the Oregon Senate and the Speaker of the House are both Democrats. The Governor is and has been a Democrat. Yeah, I sure see how the Oregon government has acted to make those dems look really bad. Oregon has been progressive in its health insurance systems for a long time. Of any state where you could express this kind of paranoia, Oregon is about the last one it would apply to.

On the other hand, a lot of the people in the rest of the state (Portland and Eugene are concentrations of "dems" who tend to drive the rest of the state who aren't) have seen first hand how much "those dems" cost us on a daily basis. But it's not from sabotage from "those repubs", it's "those dems" shooting themselves (and indirectly, us) in the foot. Or rather, pocketbook.

HAHAHAHA

[Charliemopps]

As a customer of Oracles, and having these very same products including Sieble... all I can say is "You should have asked me first"

This is exactly what we're going through. They sold us a suit of "integrated software products" that were in no-way integrated or even related. They charged us to configure the software, then when the software didn't work, told us it was configured wrong. Then when it was time for a new contract tried to exempt themselves from liability for "Configuration changes" and threatened to not renew and not fix the issue unless we did sign. (we didn't and almost ended up in court)

Then when they were making changes their support teams would log into their software through various back doors and make changes without notifying us, leaving a trail in the audit log with "NULL" in the place where the user account that made the change was supposed to be logged. They remotely modify white lists into the application suite without permission despite specific contractual agreements that they would not. We've got Oracle Employees whitelisting their home DSL accounts and logging in at random at all times of the day.

Oracle is the worst Vendor I've ever worked with. They are incompetent, malicious, vindictive and will outright lie, con and steal from their customers. They literally deprecated our ODBC connection to a SASS once because we weren't going to renew our contract and they wanted to charge us to move the data off their systems. Luckily we had planned for such a thing and already had a replication database in-house. God I hate Oracle.

Re:Oracle Services

[penix1]

But I've spoken to a half-dozen or so of their clients, and not one of them has ever had a successful completion of a project, and they've all gone over budget. Purely anecdotal evidence, I know.

I could tell you from a West Virginia perspective it isn't good:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

And that's not anecdotal evidence.

Re:what is so hard about this?

[Obfuscant]

As much as I like to blame Oracle, the state may have added serious requirements at the last minute that complicated everything.

Uhhh, no. I don't think "have a button that you can click on to enroll online" was a last minute decision. That's what was lacking -- you could browse all kinds of things, you just couldn't sign up online.

You could download a 19 page form to fill in and send back so they could send you another form to fill out to enroll, so no worries mate! Nobody died (yet) from not being able to meet the mid-December deadline for signing up for insurance to start on Jan. 1. But the nurse I talked to earlier this year was very sad for some folks she was seeing. They had regularly scheduled appointments they were keeping but they hadn't been able to get insurance yet after the plan/company they liked and wanted to keep dropped them at the end of the year. The ACA and the failure of Cover Oregon was costing them a bundle of money.

And the receptionist reminded me that I was very lucky that my co-pay was only $5 instead of the $100 some people had. Yay ACA!