So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has been updated:
> Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures.
Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money:
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million.
$650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge.
I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move.
If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).
Yea that article caused a lot of confusion amongst folks.
Personally, I don't think that the $650m has to apply for the one contract (healthcare.gov) for the general act to be quested like the post above ('and we get THIS')?
As for your math - sounds reasonable, but wow my expectations of what $55m can yield are vastly different than how you rationalized it.
It's a lot of money in some ways and not a lot of money in others. It's an exchange that will be used by millions of people who will make decisions to spend thousands of dollars a year... The amount the exchange costs is a fraction of a rounding error in the scheme of things. I'm sure the insurance companies themselves have spent vastly more just getting their systems set up.
