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by jljljl 4630 days ago
This seems a little confusing to me. I'm using the site linked in one of the previous comments:

http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...

This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I.

A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0...

  "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to 
  support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the 
  Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities.  
  This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years."
So there's not really a lot of detail on what the HHSM500200700015I solicitation actually entails, and I haven't found a clear description everywhere else. It looks like it could cover a pretty broad set of work. For example, the ACA was signed in March 2010, but there's contracts tied to this solicitation number that go back to 2008-2009.

A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t... http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...

Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?

1 comments

> Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?

> the ACA website cost only $93M

What more details do we need? There's much worse going on at the same time than that ridiculous number. But it is totally sufficient in on it's own to be outraged.

What is the appropriate cost for a health insurance marketplace that needs to support 33 states, with the security and privacy requirements such a federal system entails, and with the need to support millions of customers as soon as it opens?

Can you provide a more reasonable, informed cost estimate?