Management Failure (Editorial)

As a rule, we’re hesitant to ascribe motives to actions unless the actors have explained them. Therefore, we won’t join the commentators who have tagged as mere “meanness” the state’s decision to give beneficiaries of “private option” health insurance only 10 days to respond to questions about their continued eligibility.

Eligibility has to be determined, and continued eligibility has to be confirmed. That’s only right and fair. And federal law does allow a 10-day response period.

But it also allows a 90-day response period, and the logistical nightmare of trying to round up responses from tens of thousands of people seems like something that administrators would have wanted more time to accomplish rather than as little as possible.

Perhaps we’ve simply never encountered anyone who wanted a deadline sooner rather than later, but perhaps that’s because we’re in the newspaper business.

So from where we sit, the 10-day deadline seems less like sheer meanness than managerial overconfidence. (That is something we’ve seen in the newspaper business — and every other business we’ve observed.) Perhaps there are state officials who are eager to discontinue government-paid health insurance for the ineligible as soon as possible. But surely they didn’t set out to create what they created: a bottleneck of paperwork, the necessity of unbudgeted labor costs, insurance canceled for failure to respond rather than ineligibility — to be followed, inevitably, by the expense of adding people back on when their eligibility is confirmed.

Motives aside, this thing was badly managed. And in hindsight, it seems obvious that 10 days was not going to be enough time.