WASHINGTON — Taxpayers can expect to get stuck with a more than $1 billion bill for the creation and repair of the federal ObamaCare website, a top House Republican warned.
“The fact is, eventually they’ll get this website working at the cost of probably over a billion dollars,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.) said on Fox News Channel.
The Obama administration did not respond to The Post’s questions Thursday about the tab for the round-the-clock “tech surge” deployed in mid-October to repair HealthCare.gov.
The cost of building the bug-ridden site, which launched Oct. 1, is estimated at $600 million.
“They’re probably closer to $700 million now, and they’re going to spend a lot more doing the hard parts on the back end,” said Issa, referring to repairs to send accurate consumer data to insurers.
“Perhaps they’ll try to push back some of the cost to the vendors, who failed so miserably. But there’s no question, this is going to be extremely expensive.”
Tech experts said it should’ve cost no more than $10 million to build the site.
“It isn’t rocket science,” David Kennedy, president of the tech firm TrustedSec, told Sean Hannity on Fox News Wednesday.
“To build a site like this, with the infrastructure, the architecture around it, you are looking at maybe $5 million to $10 million at a very maximum rate.”