Caroline May of The Daily Caller reported today that astonishingly, the embattled Healthcare.gov website cost taxpayers a whopping $634,320,919.
That's more than $1 million per person in America.
As Andrew Couts of Digital Trends lamented this week,
"...in an age when the U.S. is home to the world’s largest, most successful Internet companies, how is it possible that we can't even manage to build a functional website without blowing through hundreds of millions of dollars?"
Considering the cost to build Healthcare.gov, not to mention the three years the government had to build it, it is sadly not a surprise that the federal government could not even manage to produce a working website. The hundreds of millions of dollars does not include to costs associated with fixing it. As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote for USA Today this week, in the attempt to reassure Americans that the website will be up and running soon,
"Engineers are working day and night to make upgrades. We're adding more servers to enable the system to handle larger loads. And we're upgrading our software as well to make the system more efficient and enable it to handle higher volumes."
How much does that cost taxpayers?
In 2010, topsharepoint reported that "the most expensive website in the world" was recovery.gov at a cost of $18 million U.S. taxpayer dollars. Ironically, the website "was created to track spending under the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act."
Not surprisingly, the contract to build recovery.gov went to "Smartronix, an IT firm with connections to Steny Hoyer..." Rep. Hoyer, by the way, just spoke yesterday of the need for the government to "pay it's bills," as prominently displayed on his own website, which prominently declares,
"Republicans Cause Government Shutdown"
But $18 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of taxpayer "investment" dollars into the Obamacare website.
The Examiner reported yesterday that "Just the "outreach" for Obamacare will be costing taxpayers annually 'at least $684 million.'" Yes, that was "annually."
