State health portal costing, not saving, money, audit finds

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — An audit released Wednesday found that a plan to save $500 million a year on state employee health insurance was so ill-conceived and poorly executed that it's costing taxpayers $10 million extra annually without delivering the service promised.

Auditor General Frank Mautino reported that former Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration, which originally proposed a private health insurance exchange, switched gears to an online custom-benefit portal that officials said could have been created in house. It replaced a paper-based health care program for 450,000 workers and retirees, but the promised cost-saving marketplace still isn't in place, Mautino said.

"There's the old adage that if you don't know where you want to go, any road will take you there," Mautino said. "That's what happened here."

State lawmakers ordered the review of the $94 million, 10-year contract with Georgia-based Morneau Shepell after an Associated Press report in June 2017 found that Morneau Shepell was the only company to respond to a November 2015 solicitation by Rauner's Department of Central Management Services, that CMS was instructed to skip state guidelines for ensuring minority business participation, and that customers complained of system glitches.

Since then, Morneau Shepell repeatedly failed to meet performance guarantees and was allowed to revise them when reporting performance goals to CMS, the audit said. A breach of contract provision outlined in the solicitation never made it into the contract.

The audit also said no one asked the Rauner-created Department of Innovation and Technology about the project. The agency told auditors it could have created the platform, and one department official noted that as early as 2012, CMS computer experts demonstrated an in-house online enrollment system like the Morneau...