If there is a Guinness record for the most expensive web site to build and maintain, the award should go to HealthCare.gov.
After a problematic first launch, the so-called Obamacare web site is being maintained with more than $150 million dollars of taxpayers’ money.
The Government Accountability Office stated that the total cost by the Obama administration has reached $840 million dollars.
HealthCare.gov – The official Obamacare web site.
Here’s a quick breakdown of these astounding costs for HealthCare.gov:
- The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency responsible for building the federally run insurance marketplaces, “issued task orders … when key technical requirements were still unknown.”
- When the process began in 2011, CMS obligated $56 million for the federally run exchanges, including HealthCare.gov. Those costs swelled to $209 million.
- Costs for the federal data hub, which coordinates records and personal information from several state and federal agencies to help the exchanges process applications, rose from $30 million to $80 million.
- “New and changing requirements drove cost increases during the first year of development, while the complexity of the system and rework resulting from changing CMS decisions added to … costs in the second year,” GAO states.
- CMS has paid $12.5 million to CGI Federal, the primary contractor for the site. CMS officials had problems with CGI’s work throughout the process, but the agency only withheld about 2 percent of its payments to the company.
- CMS fired CGI in January and signed a new contract with Accenture. That contract has also seen major cost overruns—from an initial obligation of $95 million to more than $175 million.
- Because CMS’s oversight of the contract with CGI was so poor, CMS officials inappropriately authorized more than $30 million in expenditures. GAO found 40 separate occasions on which work was approved incorrectly.
- “CMS launched HealthCare.gov without verification that it met performance requirements,” GAO said, because the agency pushed back reviews of the site’s performance to just weeks before the Oct. 1 launch.
Clearly, there is something wrong with how the US government manages the money it collects from its taxpayers and allocates to the budget for healthcare.
For the full HealthCare.gov study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), click here.
