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Oregon filed its long-anticipated lawsuit against Oracle America and the company’s top executives, blaming them for the state’s non-functioning health insurance exchange and saying they lied, breached contracts and engaged in “a pattern of racketeering activity.” 

The Associated Press: Oregon Sues Oracle Over Failed Health Care Website
The state of Oregon filed a lawsuit Friday against Oracle America Inc. and several of its executives over the technology company’s role in creating the troubled website for the state’s online health insurance exchange. The lawsuit, filed in Marion County Circuit Court in Salem, alleges that Oracle officials lied, breached contracts and engaged in “a pattern of racketeering activity” (Cooper, 8/22).

Oregonian: Oregon Files Long-Awaited Lawsuit Against Oracle, Prime Vendor In Cover Oregon Health Exchange Fiasco
The Oregon Department of Justice has filed its long-discussed lawsuit against Oracle America, the company state officials have accused of shoddy work on the Cover Oregon health exchange. The lawsuit drops some bombshells. It ups the ante in the legal dispute by claiming Oracle participated in “crimes” such as wire fraud and by invoking the state’s civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, showing the state intends to prove a pattern of fraudulent enrichment at Oregon’s expense (Budnick, 8/22).

Oregonian: Oracle Responds To Oregon DOJ’s Lawsuit Against Health Exchange Technology Vendor
Oracle has issued a response to the lawsuit filed today by the Oregon Department of Justice. The suit accuses the software giant of racketeering and fraud in its work on the troubled Cover Oregon health exchange project (Budnick, 8/22).

Los Angeles Times: Oregon Sues Oracle, Blaming Tech Giant For Failed Health Care Website
The Oregon attorney general sued Oracle America Inc. on Friday, charging that the technology giant committed what “amounts to a pattern of racketeering activity” that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars during the faulty rollout of its troubled health insurance exchange. In a scathing, 126-page civil complaint, Oregon Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum accused the company and several of its high-level executives of repeatedly lying to state officials, of failing to deliver on contracts and of filing an estimated $240 million in false claims after it was hired to build the Cover Oregon website (La Ganga, 8/22).

Bloomberg: Oracle, CFO Catz Accused By Oregon Of Fraud, Racketeering
Oracle Corp. (ORCL) tricked Oregon into signing $240 million worth of contracts for products and services to develop a health-care exchange that has never worked, state officials said in a $2 billion lawsuit accusing the software company of fraud and racketeering. The state lobbed the case against Oracle and five executives including President and Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz two weeks after the company sued Oregon over $23 million in unpaid bills in a feud over who is to blame for the botched website. Technical flaws in the “Cover Oregon” site, the portal to a $305 million state-run insurance exchange, caused thousands of consumers to file paper applications until the state gave up in April and directed enrollees to the federal website (Gullo, 8/23).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.