Insurance exchange in Oregon leads to breach of contract lawsuit

Oregon Health Insurance exchange

Oracle Corp. has now sued the state, alleging that the software it created is still being used regardless of disputed bills.

The technology company behind the original insurance exchange in Oregon has now filed a breach of contract lawsuit against the state, saying that officials from that government are continuing to use Oracle Corp. software, even though there remain $23 million in disputed bills.

The lawsuit was filed by Oracle at the very end of last week, in a Portland federal court.

According to the filing, Oracle claims that state officials have continued to pay the company but have still not made any payments. The lawsuit is now seeking damages of an unspecified amount. The health insurance exchange website in Oregon was never actually launched to the general public. Officials in the state have placed the blame on Oracle, but the technology company has said that it was the poor management from the state that was responsible for the problems.

The governor has already called for the state to sue Oracle with regards to the amount lost on the insurance exchange.

Oregon Health Insurance exchangeGovernor John Kitzhaber had already been calling for Oregon to file its own lawsuit against oracle in order to help the state to be able to recover at least a portion of the $134 million that it had already paid to the technology company, which is based in Redwood City, California. Back in June, Oregon had issued certain legal demands with regards to certain documents that would later be used as evidence if the state should ever sue the company.

On the other hand, though, Oracle has stated that it is actually the victim in this situation, and that the infighting among the various state agencies are what caused the Cover Oregon insurance marketplace website to fail in addition to another failure involving a separate modernization effort for the complex computer system in Oregon.

The company claims that they never received any actual definitions for the requirements for the system that would make up Cover Oregon, which is a vital step to the creation of the earliest components. In fact, they said that they still “returned empty-handed” even when they had attended a sixty day “retreat” that was meant to be a time in which the insurance exchange requirements were to be developed.

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