Oracle sues Oregon over health insurance exchange

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By JONATHAN J. COOPER and GOSIA WOZNIACKA

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oracle Corp. is suing Oregon in a continuing fiasco over the state's health insurance exchange, saying Oregon is continuing to use the technology company's software despite $23 million in disputed bills.

Oracle's breach-of-contract lawsuit against Cover Oregon was filed Friday in federal court in Portland. It alleges that state officials repeatedly promised to pay the company but have not done so.

The suit seeks unspecified damages.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140809/us-oregon-health-overhaul-oracle-lawsuit-653a69c942.html

[davidpdx]

1. If you don't deliver a working product why the hell should you get paid

It is interesting that Oregon has not yet filed suit.

[groundloop]

2. Yep, I'm forced to use an Oracle product where I work...... it sucks

[davidpdx]

3. I'm sorry to hear that

If it didn't mean losing your job, I'd ask your boss why they support a company that ripped off the State of Oregon.

[4b5f940728b232b034e4]

5. What specific product?

The last place I worked used Oracle Financials and now we're using Taleo (Oracle's recruiting product), and they're just dreadful. We've lost several good candidates because the application process is so bad. At the moment we have more people working on the project than we have candidates. It would be cheaper to have a real human do every step of the process in person than we're spending on the entire project. Of course then we wouldn't have all of the pretty graphs and reports to show to upper management to make our recruiters look like they're doing a good job.

[area51]

9. I didn't know Taleo

was an Oracle product. I hate it

[4b5f940728b232b034e4]

4. I'd like to know why it didn't work first...

before blaming someone. I worked on two large-scale health insurance projects that failed miserably, and even with very good software developers, there was no way we could succeed. In both cases, the specifications were incomplete, contradictory, and ambiguous. You can't solve a management problem with software. A former coworker of mine worked on this project, and he claimed 90% of the meetings and discussions he had with the state were concerning the way the site looked rather than dealing with functionality. I'm still connected to him on LinkedIn. I'll try to get more info.

[davidpdx]

6. The website never worked

Feel free to Google it yourself to get the technical details. I'm not an expert on it, if you understand software development maybe you can explain it. They had a contract to build a website with a database that didn't work. It was so bad the entire thing was scrapped and Oregon is now going to join the federal exchange. I think if it hasn't been for this, Oregon could have had a very good health exchange up and running.

Oregon has been considering suing Oracle over their failure to deliver a working product and hasn't yet. Oracle is suing the State of Oregon for the money they haven't been paid.

[Kelvin Mace]

7. They are jumping the gun

since Oregon was planning to sue them for fraud.

[Bette Noir]

8. Oregon is preparing a suit to get a refund for the $134 million (IIRC)

is has already paid for that POS website that never worked.

Oregon had to hire hundreds of temp workers to manually process insurance applications.

The problem was so bad that most of Oregon's population suspects shenanigans on Oracle's part.

[VA_Jill]

10. Oracle is cr@p

So says my significant other, who is a professional geek and knows something about these things. He has to deal with it on occasion and there is gnashing of teeth on such occasions.

[hunter]

11. In business it's your job to make the customer happy...

... unless you are Oracle, a big bank, military contractor, or some other mega corporation "too big to fail."