By STEVE LeBLANC Associated Press BOSTON (AP) _ The state that served as a template for President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act had so much trouble coordinating with the federal government that it became a model of another sort: ineptitude. The Massachusetts website, designed by the same contractor that worked on the troubled federal website, performed so poorly it prompted a public apology from Gov. Deval Patrick and forced health care officials to adopt a series of manual workarounds, creating a backlog of more than 50,000 paper applications. Massachusetts was one of several states where the ambition of running their own health insurance marketplace inside a new federal system ran into a harsh reality. Some, like Oregon and Nevada, folded and decided to go with the federal exchange for the second round of open enrollment, which began Saturday. Others, like Maryland and Massachusetts, fired their technology contractors and are hoping for better results this time. It hasn’t been cheap. The original cost of Massachusetts’ website was estimated at $174 million. That has jumped to $254 million. When launched, the website was incompatible with some browsers and was riddled with error messages and navigational problems. The problems were so bad, federal […]
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