Newsweek, February 6, 2014
If Obamacare gets blown up by Congress later this year, you might want to thank (or blame, depending on your prejudices regarding the Affordable Care Act) the state of Vermont. If it can’t make it there, some argue, it can’t make it anywhere.
On a warm day last July, a small group of Vermont state employees gathered eagerly in a conference room in Winooski, Vt., to witness a milestone: the first demonstration of their state’s new health insurance exchange under President Obama’s historic health insurance plan. As Melissa Boudreault, the vice president of state solutions at CGI Federal, the technology company building the website, and state staffers kicked off the event, the folks from Vermont felt a mix of apprehension and hope. Was VermontHealthConnect, the complex website CGI had been racing to build over the previous seven months, a major step closer to meeting its October 1 deadline?