Judge rules $400M algorithmic system illegally denied Medicaid benefits

With many of those decisions as incorrect as they were, with people as poor as they are here... This is a tragedy that has had people hiding the cause of their suicides for an insurance payout to their families.

I am guessing that the healthcare costs for those denied are generally larger now than they would have been had they been accepted; that the hospital system is still paying the price tag, not the destitute. - A layered tragedy in that the finances are worse for everyone but Deloitte.

Suicides happened.

As a result of a royal commission into the legality of the debt recovery scheme, it was deemed illegal, and I think all debts were rescinded. Many people in charge were recommended to be prosecuted by the anti corruption commission within the royal commission, the recommendations were made by (afaik) a Supreme Court judge. The anti corruption commission chose not to prosecute.

The unemployment system here in FL was also built to spec to be incredibly hard to use and that was the goal of the administration. I have no love lost for consultancies, but if no government agents are penalized for this and they take the fall alone it will happen again with some other consultancy.

That's such a powerful statement. If they are entitled, they are entitled. Simple as that. And anything that systematically prevents that is absolutely wrong.

What's more important is the approval process. Deloitte might have build this, but the State approved it's use. People signed off on this.

Further, this isn't an easy fix. Loosing coverage like this is not something you can just fix. This has affected people's entire life going forward, and not in a good way.

Yes, mistakes happen, but this isn't a simple one-of mistake. This is something rotten, and while Deloitte wrote it, they wrote it for a client who asked for it and put it out there. And that's who is ultimately responsible.

There you have the reason. The government software should be open source because

- People need to be able to make public officers accountable (Article XV – The society has the right of requesting an account from any public agent of its administration. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of...)

- You should be able to fire incompetent contractors, and replace them with someone else, for which open source code base makes it much more practical and the contractor cannot use any trade secrets clauses to make this impossible

> Deloitte was a major beneficiary of the nationwide modernization effort, winning contracts to build automated eligibility systems in more than 20 states, including Tennessee and Texas.

So much tax payers money wasted.

Ultimately this needs to be weighed against 1. How accurately, corruption free, and expediently would $400M of humans performed compared to the software, and 2. How much better software could have been delivered by Code for America had they been given the $400M in resources.

My gut suspicions are 1. Much worse, and 2. Much better

Not at all surprised to see the name of a big consulting firm like Deloitte in something like this. How much money and productivity is lost to these leeches across our entire economy?

Leaving aside this particular case: how can potential recipients of benefits even know how or why they were denied to bring such lawsuits in the first place? Especially if they are forced into arbitration? For example I feel like private health insurance companies, particularly Aetna, deny many claims falsely as a typical approach to avoid having to pay out as much. And patients are then subjected to a long drawn out process with hours of wait times, hours of calls, and constant vigilance. This method of avoiding payouts by creating expenses for patients should be illegal. But how can anyone see what’s happening and be in a position to challenge it without even a basic level of transparency?

Maybe the software is fully delivered within a year, at a cost of $10M? (Excluding non-software costs of this project.)

Then those team members can move on to the next project(s).

[*] I'm thinking: don't pay as much as FAANG, but maybe 50% FAANG-TC, as straight salary. Meaning FAANG mercenary types motivated only by money filter out themselves for you, but it's still doable for top-tier people who want to do beneficial work, with enough income and job stability that they shouldn't be distracted from work by those stresses. You'd really need to keep the hiring bar up, though, carefully hand-picking small teams, and not compromising if your formula is successful. (And be able to say no to agencies want to scale to too many projects in parallel, or to some politician wants to make it a jobs program, or stuff it with patronage/nepo hires.)

Years to get a benefit that should be dispersed in days or even minutes. Shame.

There are zero arguments that private Healthcare should exist.