We paid over $500M for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404 (opens in new tab)

So that amount will get you a team of 20 working for 13 years straight. Bump it up to a team of 40 and you get 6.5 years.

Regardless, I'm in the wrong business...

$1.4 trillion spent by millions of consumers in a free market will produce far better healthcare than $1.4 trillion spent by the USG. When it comes to making choices, the market is far, far more efficient than the political system.

As for the drop in the bucket, it was to produce a web app by which those millions of consumers are supposed to find health care plans, not actual health care. The drop in the bucket is a miserable failure! It should serve as an index of what to expect from the system, as currently constituted.

There should be no USG health care site. Consumers should be free to type "health care" in their search bar and select the best one they find. High deductible or low deductible. Across state lines. Birth control covered or not. Mental or not. It should be like choosing a smart phone. And the government's role should be limited to keeping the suppliers honest.

To start with the proposal process is extremely intense and only a small number of companies have the resources to even apply for a project like this. The system I worked on was more simple than this and our proposal documentation was hundreds of pages.

With this being such a hot political issue, I can't even imagine the politics going on behind the scenes on top of any technical challenges. The number of meetings and reviews was probably astronomical.

I have no doubt that some principles at CGI are making huge profits off of projects like these, but it's not totally free money as it might seem.