ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - The troubled website for Minnesota’s health insurance exchange cannot be completely fixed in time for the March 31 deadline by which all Americans are supposed to have coverage under the new federal law, according to an independent review released Wednesday.
MNsure released findings of the review by UnitedHealth Group division Optum. It described a deeply flawed website that won’t be able to meet enrollment expectations without manual workarounds and other improvised fixes. People who don’t have insurance coverage by March 31 face federal tax penalties.
The review lays out several options for fixing the website that it said could take between 12 and 24 months. Among the options laid out are abandoning major aspects of the current website and essentially rebuilding it from scratch. MNsure officials commissioned the Optum review, and members of MNsure’s board of directors said at a meeting Wednesday they would immediately begin considering how to proceed from the options it laid out.
The review identifies a number of fundamental problems with MNsure.org, including:
- Lack of capacity for tying together all data entered by consumers.
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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - When a brain tumor took away Dorothy Holm’s ability to speak, she picked up index cards and began filling them, edge to edge, with seemingly random, indecipherable sequences of letters. Her grandchildren saw her scribbling and thought she was leaving them a code - but it was one the preteens couldn’t crack.
Eighteen years later, the puzzle has been solved after one of Holm’s granddaughters posted images of a card online. In just 13 minutes, a MetaFilter.com user figured out that as Dorothy Holm was dying, she was writing out prayers.
“It was kind of relieving to have an answer, even if we don’t know what every single word says,” Janna Holm, who posted the card, said. “It’s nice to know that they were prayers, and kind of gave some insight into what she was thinking and what she was focused on in her last couple weeks.”
Holm said Wednesday that her grandmother, who lived in Shakopee, was diagnosed with lung cancer that metastasized and formed a brain tumor. She died in 1996 when Janna was 11. In her final weeks, she wrote line after line of capital letters on roughly 20 index cards, sparking her grandkids’ curiosity.
Holm said she, her brother and two cousins - then ranging in age from 8 to 12 - spent a few months trying to figure out what the letters stood for, but failed.
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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - The top Republican in the Minnesota House says he intends to stay in his leadership post and believes he properly handled an incident last September in Montana where a friend pulled out the lawmaker’s loaded handgun after a vehicle purchase went bad.
Rep. Kurt Daudt (DOWT’) broke nearly two weeks of silence about the incident Wednesday. He says they confronted the vehicle’s seller with complaints he misrepresented its condition, but says his friend retrieved the gun without his knowledge.
Daudt’s friend, 24-year-old Daniel Weinzetl, faces felony charges.
Daudt says Weinzetl’s family lives near his cabin and that the younger man has helped him previously with odd jobs, including joining him on a previous trip to Montana to buy a vehicle.
Daudt says he has a handgun permit. He says he rarely carries it but brought it for safety on the long road trip.
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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - A state psychiatrist committed emotional maltreatment by threatening a mentally ill patient with electroshock therapy, Minnesota’s commissioner of human services determined, overruling an earlier decision by her department.
Dr. James Christensen’s remark to the patient at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter was “inconsistent with the manner expected of a professional caregiver” and “the conversation constitutes abuse,” Commissioner Lucinda Jesson found.
“The reasonable person on the street of St. Paul or St. Peter probably would find a psychiatrist saying - in a raised voice with some anger - that he was going to ’shock your brain’ to a committed patient to be threatening,” Jesson wrote in a letter explaining her decision, the Star Tribune reported (https://strib.mn/1aJbQEVhttps://strib.mn/1aJbQEV ).
Christensen was warned he will be disqualified from working for the state if he commits further maltreatment in the next seven years.
Christensen denied to state investigators that he made the threat, but a state psychologist and another colleague present during the interaction had reported hearing it. Christensen did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. He is the only fulltime psychiatrist on staff at the Minnesota Security Hospital.
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