New York City
Deloitte Fails Two-Thirds Of Users, Gets The Next Contract Anyway
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY -- New York State paid Deloitte Consulting $1.1 billion to build a system that automatically determines whether elderly and low-income residents qualify for Medicaid. After one year of operation, the system correctly processes approximately one in three enrollees without human assistance. The contract remains active. Phase two is scheduled.
The New York Department of Health began migrating 147,000 Medicaid and Medicare Savings Program enrollees to the new platform in September 2025. State officials confirmed this week that only about a third of those enrollees have been able to renew their coverage automatically, meaning the automated system built to replace human caseworkers has, so far, required human caseworkers to handle the majority of its workload. Deloitte's invoice was not prorated.
Lindsay Heckler, managing attorney at the Center for Elder Law and Justice, told reporters her firm has seen a surge in what she described as inappropriate denials, meaning elderly residents being told by a computer that they do not qualify for the coverage a human had already determined they do. "My concern is that in the coming year they are moving more people into a system that doesn't have the kinks worked out for the people that are in the system right now," Heckler said, deploying the word 'kinks' to describe what is, functionally, a billion-dollar machine that works less reliably than asking someone nicely.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said the system was thoroughly tested by both the agency and Deloitte before launch, which raises the question of what the testing measured, and whether passing meant something different in the room where Deloitte got paid than it does in the room where an 80-year-old is filling out a paper form because the computer lost her file.
The platform is called the Medicaid Eligibility and Client Management system, a name that contains the word 'management' and the word 'eligibility' and suggests, from the outside, that someone has managed eligibility. The state's position is that problems are being identified and addressed in real time, which is another way of saying the 147,000 people who moved into this system in 2025 are the beta testers, and that their prescriptions and doctor visits are the quality assurance process.
A second wave of enrollees, described by officials as more complex cases, is scheduled to migrate to the same system between November 2027 and February 2028. These are the harder cases, the ones the current system cannot yet handle, being loaded into a system that currently cannot handle the easier ones. State officials have described this timeline as a plan.
Deloitte, which reported $67.2 billion in global revenue last fiscal year, has not commented publicly on the one-in-three success rate. The firm has previously delivered government technology projects in California, Georgia and Pennsylvania, some of which also worked partially.
New York's previous Medicaid system relied on paper applications processed through local social services offices and was widely described as outdated and in desperate need of overhaul. The new system is faster, centralized, and reportedly capable of issuing a real-time eligibility determination, provided the person applying is among the third it has decided to recognize.
The remaining two-thirds are asked to be patient.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook-pm/2026/10/01/new-york-grapples-with-kinks-in-1b-medicaid-system-01103951