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Oregon shifts 4,000 illegal immigrants into Obamacare

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An Oregon Obamacare exchange failure shifted nearly 4,000 applicants for a state program that provides pregnancy services to illegal immigrants into the state’s expanded Medicaid program, the Oregonian reports.

The Oregon Health Plan serves as the state’s version of Medicaid for low-income residents. Two-thirds of the Obamacare exchange’s enrollments have been for the expanded Medicaid program, adding over 70,000 Oregonians to the plan.

But state officials have been manually sending the information incorrectly and incompletely for months, and thousands of applicants to the Citizen/Alien Waived Emergent Medical program, which provides services to low-income individuals without a legal immigration status, were given full coverage under Medicaid instead.

“It never works perfectly the first time out,” Oregon Health Authority manager Kathleen Paul said Friday. “We were just getting people into the services.”

Cover Oregon has been battling it out with Maryland’s Obamacare exchange for having the most glitch-ridden Obamacare rollout in the country, despite both deep-blue states immediately adopting and implementing Obamacare, supplied with millions of early innovator grants courtesy of federal taxpayers.

The state’s health department, the Oregon Health Authority, which tracks Oregon Health Plan members, was supposed to communicate electronically with the Obamacare exchange. But the electronic interface was one of the many parts that didn’t work on the exchange.

Until several weeks ago, state officials have been sending information incorrectly and incompletely for months, Paul said. State officials are fixing the enrollment glitch manually on a case-by-case basis.

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