1. Cover Oregon was an ill-fated attempt at a state-run exchange of the Affordable
Care Act passed by President Obama in 2010. The Oregon exchange was poorly
managed by Governor John Kitzhaber and his team and cost the federal government
$250 million dollars - only to fail miserably in 2014 because instead of focusing on
creating a successful online portal, the emphasis was placed on marketing and out-
reach, which ended up being a waste.
This research project began before the embarrassing failure of Cover Oregon,
but it still offers a stimulating comparison between Oregon residents and non-resi-
dents to garner the overall knowlege about the program through survey questions.
I believe it is every citizens’ right to a transparent government that educates
citizens, rather than hides important information - especially on topics that relate to
EVERY life like universal healthcare.
By Katherine Virden

2. Table of Contents
Executive Summary
About Cover Oregon
The Survey
Significance of the lack of knowledge
about Cover Oregon
Continued Data Coding and Analysis
Recommendation
Conclusion
Appendix
Executive Summary
For this research report I chose to focus
on Cover Oregon, the state version of the Afford-
able Care Act or Obamacare as it is commonly
known. I created a nine-question survey and
handed and sent it out to random Oregon State
University, garnering answers from a total of 55
students. Not all of the questions had answers
because the electronic copies produced on Sur-
vey Monkey would not allow participants to skip
questions, and as a result the written surveys
had many more blank questions. The majority
of the OSU students surveyed were residents
of Oregon and between the ages of 18-24. The
trends I will unpack in the nine questions are
the difference between Oregon residents and
non-residents’ answers and provide a compare
and contrast analysis. Some of the more signifi-
cant trends include:
· Question 5: “What is Cover Ore-
gon?” – differences and similarities
in Oregon residents and non-resi-
dents’ answers.
· Question 6: “Describe Cover Or-
egon in two sentences” – amount
of people who put two sentenc-
es, have fragments, and word
choice differences and similarities
between Oregon residents and
non-residents’ answers.
· Question 7: “How is Cover Ore-
gon perceived?” – differences and
similarities in Oregon residents and
non-residents’ answers.
· Question 8: “How effective was
Cover Oregon marketing before
it was available?” – ranked on a
scale from 1 – 5, 5 being high and
one being low – differences and
similarities in Oregon residents and
non-residents’ answers.
· Question 9: “Have you enrolled in
Cover Oregon? What has been
your experience” – applies only to
Oregon residents.
Initially the thesis of the report was to
prove that the $10 million spent on marketing
Cover Oregon was a waste because the adver-
tisements did not mention what Cover Oregon
was or how to enroll in it. For example, the
majority of students surveyed had no idea what
Cover Oregon was because the commercials,
radio songs, and billboards had only a catch-
ing slogan, “Long Live Oregonians” that could
have been very successful because who doesn’t
want to live a long life, but the slogan and com-
mercials with hipster songs did not do their job,
which was get as many people as possible to
sign up for
healthcare.
The slogan
“Long Live
Oregonians”
did not connect
to the concept
behind Cover
Oregon and
the Affordable
Care Act. The
picture to the
left is one of
many adver-
tisements
Cover Oregon
used in its
outreach. The
man encom-
passes an Oregon stereotype: beards, rainboots,
man purse, but the strangest aspect is the danc-
ing heart just below him. There is no explain-
ation for how the two relate. Since this project
began in week 3, Cover Oregon was shut down
by the government week 4 on April 24, 2014.
I continue to highlight that the money the
Cover Oregon team spent on marketing was
wasted based on the opinion-based answers to
the surveys, which have interesting word choices
that describe the program. I analyze the signifi-
cance in the different answers between Oregon
residents and non-residents, which serve as my
point of comparison through the entire investiga-
tion. I will make recommendations that no one
buys into government run healthcare without
educating themselves and doing research first.
The research project will be used in my
professional portfolio as I pursue a career in pol-
itics. I was very interested in providing insight to
the Cover Oregon disaster and in learning more
about it and hopefully educate others along the
way.
About Cover Oregon
Since many people in the state of Oregon
had no idea there was an initiative to have state-
run healthcare despite the millions of dollars
spent on marketing, it is important to identify
exactly what it is to prevent further confusion.
Cover Oregon was meant to be a health insur-
ance marketplace online for the state of Oregon,
establishing the implementation of the Affordable
Care Act or Obamacare, which allows individuals
and small businesses to purchase healthcare at
low subsidized rates. One of the platform is-
sues President Obama ran for office on was the
need to create healthcare that was available to
every American citizen, and Oregon was one of
the first states to receive government money to
ensure this promise went through by creating a
state-run online insurance portal.
Unfortu-
nately,
things did
not go as
planned.
Under-
standing
the Cover
Oregon
failure is critically important because it impacts
the national reputation of the state in a very
negative way. The Oregon portal was supposed
to be the leading example for the rest of the
nation about how to create and run a successful
online insurance portal. The government gave
the Cover Oregon team $305 million in federal
grants to get the program started, however, by
March 2013, already $248 million of the money
was spent on marketing strategies and the online
portal building company, Oracle Corp.
The marketing and outreach plan is on-
line, and it presents various ads that were used
on the radio and television. The advertisements
are abstract and do not connect the Afford-
able Care Act to the mission of Cover Oregon.
What ended up happening is the Cover Oregon
website did not work, there was financial mis-
management, and ultimately the program was
abandoned, wasting all of the government mon-
ey. Instead, the Cover Oregon website (cov-
eroregon.com) sends customers to the federal

3. marketplace, which had its own problems in the
beginning – healthcare.gov.
The abandonment of the Cover Oregon
website was a terrible embarrassment for Ore-
gon because the federal government gave the
state exorbitant amounts of money specifically
to create a successful online insurance por-
tal meant to be an example for the rest of the
country to follow, but it failed miserably. For the
purposes of this project I wanted to highlight
the mess of Cover Oregon, provide more back-
ground information and a definition of the pro-
gram. I believe healthcare should be available to
everyone, but I disagree with the Affordable Care
Act so readers should be warned, I am biased
and this project does not highlight the ‘positive’
qualities of Cover Oregon.
The Survey
I used Survey Monkey, a free website for
what I needed for this project where I created a
nine-question survey. I passed it out to students
in the Memorial Union and sent it to other stu-
dents online. There were originally 10 questions,
but the one I dropped asked students to iden-
tify their major, which does not hold very much
weight as a comparison, and I could not identify
a pattern. I decided to leave it out and focus on
coding how Oregon residents and non-residents
answered the questions.
The survey can be found at this link to
look at the Survey Monkey formatting, but I will
provide the questions here as well.
1. Are you an Oregon resident?
a. Yes
b. No
2. What is your age?
a. 18 to 24
b. 25 to 34
c. 35 to 44
d. 45 to 54
e. 55 to 64
f. 65 or older
3. Do you currently have health insur-
ance, or not?
a. Yes, I do
b. No, I do not
4. If yes, what health insurance do
you have? (possible answers:
parents, private company, Cover
Oregon, none)
5. What is Cover Oregon?
6. Describe Cover Oregon in two
sentences:
7. How is Cover Oregon perceived?
a. Positive
b. Neutral
c. Negative
8. How effective was Cover Oregon
marketing before it was available?
1 being low, 5 being high
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4
e. 5
9. Have you enrolled in Cover Ore-
gon?
a. Yes
i. If yes, what has been
your experience?
b. No
The strategy behind the layout of the question
was I wanted participants to answer a few gen-
eral questions before I jumped into the specifics
about Cover Oregon. There are some reasons
for this. For example, I didn’t want the questions
to come off as bipartisan, which is part of the log-
ic behind not including a question asking for stu-
dents to identify with a political party, and if stu-
dents didn’t know what Cover Oregon was and
that was the first thing they saw, they could have
gotten discouraged and filled out very few of the
questions, especially the students who took the
survey in person rather than online. There was
way more people who skipped answers making
the total number filled out uneven because there
wasn’t a requirement to fill each out, whereas
online, the survey couldn’t be completed if there
were any questions left unanswered.
Significance of the lack of
knowledge about Cover
Oregon
Out of the 55 Oregon State University
students studied, 83.64% or 46 people were
Oregon residents and 16.36% or 9 people were
non-residents, and it was interesting to code the
differences in describing Cover Oregon espe-
cially in Question 5: “What is Cover Oregon”
and Question 6: “Describe Cover Oregon in
two sentences.” Nine non-residents answered
question 5, and five or 55.55% defined it, as
healthcare for Oregon, while four participants or
44.44% had no idea. By contrast, there were 44
responses by Oregon residents. 32 of the 44 re-
sponses or 72% knew what it was and described
it as Oregon’s health insurance or mentioned
the Affordable Care Act to get the question right.
Seven out of the 44 or 16% acknowledged that
they did not know, but guessed healthcare and
were correct (making the percentage of people
who got the question right: 88%). Five of the
44 participants or 11% did not know what Cover
Oregon was. The numbers are positive towards
the effectiveness of the Cover Oregon marketing,
however in Question 6 that asked students to
describe the program in two sentences is much
more telling.
The two sentences gave the opportunity
for students to show how much they knew or
didn’t know about the program that spent millions
of dollars to ensure the majority of Oregonians
knew what it was. The marketing strategies
were so obvious that some of the non-residents
knew what Cover Oregon was, but the majority
did not because the promotional tools did not
portray that it was insurance or describe how to
enroll in it. For example, the image below used
to be on several billboards on major Oregon
highways. The image is of a pill bottle, which is
supposed to relate to pills making people hap-
py, as it says on the bottle itself, and it features
several happy people with trees. The pill bottle
is the only thing that might relate to healthcare,
otherwise the advertisement is very misleading.
Taking a look at the data collected from
non-residents first, there were only eight re-
sponses to the question asking them to describe
Cover Oregon in two sentences on question 6. A
total of three people put two sentences, and they
had two full sentences while the other five had
no idea. Five people out of the eight or 62.5% of
the non-resident students surveyed did not know
what Cover Oregon was, meaning over half of
the students either did not see any of the market-
ing strategies or they failed to understand what
was being marketed.
Figure 1 portrays the full responses of
students who had no idea how to describe Cover
Oregon in two sentences, but the responses of
students who did know what Cover Oregon was
are broken into fragments.
By contrast, there were 39 total responses
to Question 6 by Oregon residents so the cate-
gories are split differently to encompass the wide
variety of answers. For instance:
· 23 of the 39 responses or 59%
used two sentences with words
like: healthcare, Obamacare, plan,
insurance, federal mandate
· 11 of the 39 responses or 28% did
not know at all
· 15 of the 39 responses or 38.46%
did NOT write two sentences like
the directions asked
· 13 of the 39 responses or 33.33%
were negatively opinionated to-
wards Cover Oregon
· 6 or the 39 responses or 15.38%
were positively opinionated to-
wards Cover Oregon
The percentages further break down and code
each student’s answers and analyze the general
understanding of Cover Oregon. Asking each
student to write two sentences gave them the
opportunity to use descriptive words and state
an opinion rather than just answering multi-

4. ple-choice questions. Those students who did
not know provided clear answers like those of
the non-resident students with ‘IDK, I don’t know,
or NA’ to name a few. The students who iden-
tified that Cover Oregon was health insurance
and explained how they felt about it created the
code of descriptive language. It was important
for me to have an expressive question so I could
understand how my generation understood the
healthcare program because the Affordable Care
Act will impact our entire lives.
Continuing on, Figure 2 shows the con-
trast of the negative to positive language re-
sponses, and each row is very different than its
opposite counterpart.
The table shows that those who think
negatively of Cover Oregon use much harsher
words like ‘waste, failed, weird and massive,’ all
words that highlight certain aspects that were
highly unsuccessful. The majority of participants
who used negative language put that it was a
failed attempt and poor execution. By contrast,
the positive responses used more general words
to create a conclusive perspective about the
benefits of Cover Oregon using words like ‘ex-
tends, opportunity, possible and exciting.’ Also,
note that the negative language participants
described the commercials as ‘weird’ contrasting
to the positive language response of ‘cute com-
mercials.’
The difference in interpretations is intrigu-
ing because by looking at it through a bipartisan
lens, if a person already has an opinion about
something, whether educated on the issue or
not, but whichever ideology hits home, deter-
mines how to think about Cover Oregon and
specifically the commercials. Also, technical
and professional writers must always be aware
to draft documents or use technology in ways
that can be understood by specific audiences
and prevent misinterpretation. In my own expe-
rience, I am a Republican because I agree with
several core values of the party, but definitely not
everything. However, when the Affordable Care
Act was passed and Cover Oregon was created,
I did my research about both programs to deter-
mine my negative opinion about it.
Continued Data Coding and
Analysis
The answers to questions seven through
nine make up the other parts of data coding and
analysis by highlighting opinions about Cover
Oregon as well as the effectiveness of the mar-
keting. I will not go into extensive detail about
the questions in the survey that asked partici-
pants if they had health insurance because it is
irrelevent to my main focus on the impressions
of the expensive Cover Oregon marketing as it
relates to the overall understanding of the pro-
gram. When I created the survey, I wasn’t sure
what questions would have the most impact or
create the most interesting results, but looking
back I should have had a question on the survey
that asked students to identify as a political party
to glimpse how the majority fell. I was trying to
avoid bipartisan controversy in the project; how-
ever, I am very opinionated in my beliefs so the
research design is already skewed to the right. If
I had a percentage of each party represented it
would seem more accurate.
Anyway, Question 7 is an opinionated
based question that asked students to rate how
Cover Oregon was perceived using the ranks
of positive, neutral and negative. There were a
total of seven responses by non-residents and
45 from Oregon residents, and Figure 3 below
shows the breakdown.
The comparison of answers between
non-residents and Oregon residents is com-
pelling because though the representation of
non-residents is substantially smaller, the be-
liefs are almost identical to the neutral beliefs of
Oregon residents. The large numbers of neu-
trality represents people who both did not know
what Cover
Oregon was
and did not
want to take
an affirma-
tive stance on the issue or participants really did
not feel strongly about how Cover Oregon came
off to them as individuals. Subsequently, the
non-residents perceived Cover Oregon much
more positively than Oregon residents because
almost half of the participants thought negatively
about it. There could be several reasons for this:
· Non-residents liked the catchy
commercials and radio advertise-
ments and never explored the
details of Cover Oregon
· Residents could have been more
likely to do research to understand
Cover Oregon and didn’t like it
· Political beliefs, whether Republi-
can or Democrat could have played
a huge part
· Non-residents do not have come
to terms with the repercussions of
Cover Oregon, but appreciated the
commercials and advertisements
nonetheless
I could speculate as much as I want, but
it’s impossible to know exactly why non-residents
and residents perceive Cover Oregon, but the
striking differences in the positive and negative
interpretation contrast strongly.
Similarly, these speculations lead to the
eighth question on the survey, which asked
students to rate the effectiveness of the Cover
Oregon marketing on a scale of one to five, one
being low and five being high. Question 8 is
critically important because the Cover Oregon
team spent the majority of its time and money on
publicizing the program rather than designing a
portal that actually worked.
Although I collected surveys before
Cover Oregon fell through and became a huge
embarrassment for the state, the data is still
critically important to understand how Oregon
State University students felt about the market-
ing of the healthcare program because millions
of dollars went solely into that effort. As Figure
4 shows, the effectiveness of the Cover Oregon
marketing is scattered across the board. Inter-
estingly, non-residents did not give the program
high-ranking scores while they did think of Cover
Oregon more positively according to Figure 3.
The contrast is intriguing because Oregon res-
idents were much more varied in the possible
answers as opposed to Figure 3.
If international or out of state students do
not know what the healthcare program is after
The large numbers of neutral-
ity represents people who did
not want to take an affirmative
stance on the issue.

5. the millions of dollars spent in marketing, the
promotion was unsuccessful and a waste espe-
cially after the program shut down. Cover Ore-
gon was meant to be an example for the rest of
the country so since the marketing team could
not effectively communicate its mission to out of
state residents, how is it certain that Oregonians
received the message? Had I done this survey
later in the term after the shutdown was reported
nationally, I am certain more people would have
been able to accurately judge the marketing and
answer the question “What is Cover Oregon.”
Since more Oregon residents were able to
take the survey the data collected from them rep-
resents a larger portion of Oregonians. The data
is very similar to the responses about how Cover
Oregon was perceived; there are many more
negative opinions. Perhaps since Oregonians
are the ones who will have to live with the health-
care program, the OSU students took the initia-
tive to research the program and understand the
truth of it. I personally think political parties have
the most to do with how students especially vote.
Since the majority of the students surveyed were
ages 18-24, that age group has just left their
parents for the first time to discover who they are
as individuals. However, the beliefs they were
indoctrinated with by living with parents who affil-
iated with a party often subconsciously influence
the decisions of college students.
The final question with substantial data is
question nine that asked participants if they were
enrolled in Cover Oregon. 100% of the seven
non-resident respondents had not. However, out
of the 45 answers by Oregon residents, 86.67%
or 39 people did not register, but 13.33% or six
people had. In the event that there was a partic-
ipant who had enrolled in Cover Oregon, I asked
them to write a few words about their experi-
ence. Those 6 outliers are real responses as to
how the online portal worked (or didn’t) as Ore-
gon citizens attempted to comply with the new
federal mandate or the Affordable Care Act. The
six responses are as follows:
1. Great!
2. I haven’t heard back.
3. It took far too long to enroll. My
two sons are still waiting, after six
months to be enrolled. Glad it’s
there, but it is very poorly run.
4. Horrible. I am listed as two-years-
old and still haven’t been able to
get that changed.
5. It needs to be more on top of help-
ing clients who need immediate
care.
6. I haven’t heard back in several
months.
The responses foreshadow the very real
problems Cover Oregon had from the beginning.
The online portal created by a group called Ora-
cle was very difficult to use and often resulted in
misinformation like with response #4 who hasn’t
been able to change the issue. As a result of the
failure, Oregonians will sign up for healthcare
through the federal exchange just like everyone
else - even citizens who signed up through Cov-
er Oregon will be forced to redo their applica-
tions. Answer #3 is unique because it highlights
the amount of time it took to get confirmation of
enrollment in the program to then continue to
find the proper health insurance. The answer
signifies how important it is to have health insur-
ance – to know it’s
there in the event of
an emergency, but
this participant as
well as #2, 5, and 6
did not receive qual-
ity customer service.
It’s questionable that
the Oregon govern-
ment would create
such a program that
does not treat the
people enrolling with
respect of meeting
their needs right away by providing quality health
insurance. Instead, the state dedicated most of
its budget to market the failed healthcare pro-
gram that according to Figure 4 was not under-
stood in its message because it was ineffective
in linking the catchy commercials to Oregon’s
imitation of the Affordable Care Act. The im-
age of the woman on the previous page literally
dancing with her lungs is another example of the
advertisments that did not link the overall health
of Oregonians to the state-run portal.
Recommendations
In order to avoid such a catastrophic fail-
ure as Oregon’s healthcare program under the
Affordable Care Act called Cover Oregon, it is
necessary for all citizens to stay educated about
what the state government is doing. Constitu-
ents need to require transparency of state offi-
cials to find out what their tax dollars are funding
and hold state representatives accountable for
each decision. Cover Oregon was granted mil-
lions of dollars by the federal government, but it
wasn’t until problems became very apparent that
Republican Representative Greg Walden enlist-
ed the help of the federal Government Account-
ability Office to investigate. I firmly believe that
if Oregon residents took the time to visit their
district representative in Salem, Oregon, the
communication between the government and its
citizens would increase substantially and hope-
fully prevent a disaster like Cover Oregon from
ever happening again. As due-paying citizens,
it is our right to know what the local and federal
government is up to especially when our hard
earned dollars are thrown in the mix.
Furthermore, if another student or re-
searcher desires to find out what a specific body
of people think about Cover Oregon, I would
recommend the addition of a question that asks
each participant to identify which party they
belong to because it will provide more substan-
tial data. Survey Monkey has a useful feature to
compare each visual by a certain data point. In
my research, I compared all questions to if par-
ticipants were residents or not, however, it would
have been significantly more beneficial to under-
stand how identifying with a political party alters
each answer if I had each participant choose
between Democrat, Republican, Independent or
‘Other.’ The image is of President Obama’s crest
with a slash through
it representing my
personal beliefs
against the Afford-
able Care Act.
Since the marketing team could not ef-
fectively communicate its mission to out
of state residents, how is it certain that
Oregoniasn recieved the message?

6. Conclusion
Despite the fact that Cover Oregon, which
was the state’s healthcare program meant to
comply with the new federal mandate or the
Affordable Care Act, ended up being an embar-
rassment and damaged the state’s reputation
because it failed horribly, my research project
was very valuable. I was able to look at some-
thing I cared about and study the knowledge
a small percentage of OSU students and their
knowledge about the program before it became
a debacle.
The comparison between non-residents
and Oregon residents carries weight because it
shows the effectiveness of the marketing, how
many students understood what Cover Oregon
was, who could explain it, and how the program
was perceived. As a simple survey catered to-
wards busy college students with few spare min-
utes, the data I collected is relevant because it
shows the knowledge about Cover Oregon at the
time. If I were to continue the study, I would give
out the same survey adding a question about
which political party the students identify with
and see how the responses changed after the
failure Cover Oregon was nationally publicized.
In conclusion, the research project was a
highly valuable experience. It will be something I
reference in my professional political career and
will showcase it on personal blogs. I truly be-
lieve that the most important thing in politics is to
keep the conversation going, and I will say that
again and again. Each side of the healthcare
debate needs to maintain conversations with one
another and work to stay educated on the entire
issue. If members of each political party and
belief are able to interact with one another prog-
ress can be made. Setting all bias aside, each
perspective is important and should be valued
just as much as the last. It is critically important
to remember everyone we interact with on a dai-
ly basis does not agree with our every thought,
which is a beautiful thing. It’s amazing to have
such diversity of thoughts in this nation, but since
the two major political parties have become so
polarized, it’s harder to reach out to those differ-
ent than us.
Through this research project I have had
the opportunity to learn more about what people
who support the Affordable Care Act think and
value their contributions. Also, I have grown
stronger in my own political beliefs. I stay very
up-to-date on political issues and if there is
one thing I have learned it’s that my generation
needs to start critical conversations, whether we
agree or not, and keep them going.
Each perspective is important
and should be valued just as
much as the last.
Appendix
The Appendix features images of the Survey
Monkey graphs I used for the investigation. All
of the questions compared answers from Ore-
gon residents to non-residents to get interesting
results.