As Mark Twain said, "A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants."
We all know Republican website authors find it easier to spread lies than breathe. However their lies readily become accepted as fact, sometimes just among themselves (see Unskewed polls, $716 billion cuts), sometimes those lies can become "bi-partisan".
It has now become Conservatruth that the healthcare.gov website cost US taxpayers over $500 million.
Almost every Republican leading blog has run with the story that healthcare.gov cost $634 million.
The $500 million cost has even been accepted as fact on the front page of Daily Kos.
Everyone has now accepted a new truism. Healthcare.gov cost over a $half billion.
Time to get back to some truthiness.
The values of contracts awarded to CGI Technology and Solutions are publicly available. This spreadsheet details all of the contracts given to CGI since 2007. Yes 2007, the year George Bush was a lame duck, economists were talking of a credit crunch (not even imagining a banking collapse) and Hillary Clinton was going to face Rudy Giuliani in November of the next year.
Scroll to the bottom of the spreadsheet, the amount awarded is $640,880,247
Yep Rush was right, we can all go home now and celebrate our free dumbs and cry over lost taxpayer money?Yeah? No.
Well let's delete the expenditures that could not possibly be related to the ACA. Anything before January 20 2009.
Wow Healthcare.gov still cost $600 million. Time to get the tricorn hats out and march with Ted Cruz. Well you can only make this assumption if you think that the administration knew what the Affordable Care Act would look like after it passed Congress before a bill was even presented to congress.
Wow you can filter. The only item you can filter on Treasury Account Symbol Initiative is "AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT". Wo Ben Ghazi, the stimulus only cost $14 million. Let's just remove that cost.
Hmm, you can filter by completion date. The website had a go live date of 1 October 2013. It would have needed to be available for testing on 1 September 2013.
That gives you healthcare.gov. The $93 million maximum cost contract is listed so is the cost of all of the supplemental additions as a result of the Supreme Court and States changing their local rules after the contract was awarded.
So the actual cost to taxpayers for a site as extensive as healthcare.gov $55,744,082. The cost of all of the supplemental work as a result of changes forced on the ACA by a Republican Supreme Court and Republican States who could not wait to deny their residents health care, $63, 933,755. Total cost $119,677,837. Nowhere near $500 million, $634 million or $eleventee blumptee.
This by the way is a still high estimate of the actual cost of the website, because it will include other supplementals. Even The Blaze (ffs) estimated the cost of healthcare.gov to be nowhere near the $634 million figure. They are claiming the full $93.7 million maximum cost.
The Sunlight Foundation estimates a cost of $70 million for the site,with the other costs being largely indirect.
This is a fair chunk of change. Healthcare.gov is not however a homepage on geocities back from the day Yahoo was king.
Websites that have complex backends that need to a simple front end are incredibly expensive. This is a website that needs to interface with insurance companies, assess eligibility and level of subsidy available, and produce different results for different states. It needs to be secure, it needs to be crash proof and it needs to cope with high traffic levels.
None of that is cheap. And at 1/10th of the cost of the United Kingdom's failed healthcare database, it is however pretty good value, despite the yes, major issues that do need ironing out and urgently.
Finally this contract was not a sweetheart deal for CGI from the Obama administration. The original contract was awarded in 2007and meant that 16 contractors would have an Indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract. Think zero hour contracts for IT suppliers. They would have an order without bid for a minimum of $1,000 and a maximum of $4 billion. The idea of the contract is to be able to streamline major system development. The contract ends in 2017.