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The Government Accountability Office announced on Wednesday that it will look into the problems with the nation's five really bad state-run Obamacare exchanges. This marks the end of the period when, given how bad the federal exchange was, state exchanges (and the mostly Democratic leaders who advocated for them) were seen as an example of what states could accomplish if they embraced the law. And while that's still true — Kentucky, Connecticut, and California still deserve bragging rights for their exchanges — the inadequacies of the worst exchanges are more glaring than ever.
According to the Associated Press, the GAO will investigate how Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oregon used federal funds, whether the government can recoup any of those funds, and what can be done to prevent similar failures in the future. Last month a group of Republican representatives, including one from Oregon, requested the investigation. The next day Oregon's two Democratic senators echoed the request, because there is literally nothing to defend. Oregon's exchange, which, $210 million later has not enrolled a single person online, is objectively the worst healthcare exchange in the country.