How much did it cost to build the Obama care website
Executive summary
The headline number most often repeated is wrong: the wildly circulated "$5 billion" figure for HealthCare.gov lacks documentary support and has been debunked by multiple fact‑checks (Snopes, PolitiFact) [1][2]. Contemporary government audits and independent analyses put the most defensible range for federal HealthCare.gov development and remediation costs between roughly $1.7 billion and a bit over $2 billion, while earlier press accounts quoted lower tallies for partial components [3][4][1].
1. What the official audits and contract tallies say — the $1.7B baseline
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Inspector General reported that the original estimate for contracts associated with developing HealthCare.gov totaled $1.7 billion, a figure cited repeatedly in subsequent fact checks and investigations as the most direct tally of federal contract obligations tied to the portal itself [3][1].
2. Independent analysts pushed the number higher — Bloomberg’s >$2B estimate
Bloomberg Government conducted an independent analysis that counted both initial construction contracts and the large remediation effort after the failed 2013 launch, arriving at a total above $2 billion; that analysis is the basis for media summaries stating the “more than $2 billion” price tag when fixes and follow‑on work are included [4][5].
3. Why earlier, lower figures also circulated — partial counts and operating contracts
Some contemporaneous reports in 2013–2014 cited substantially lower figures — for example, pieces that focused on particular contract lines or early outlays put the cost at hundreds of millions (Time reported figures approaching $1 billion in mid‑2014, and National Journal cited $840 million for certain expenditures) — because they measured subsets of work (initial vendor payments, specific cloud or data‑hub contracts) rather than the aggregate of development plus fixes and continued operations [6][7][8].
4. The $5 billion claim: political theater, not audited reality
The oft‑repeated "$5 billion" figure used by politicians and in social posts has no supporting primary documentation and was explicitly rated false by Snopes and questioned by PolitiFact; those fact‑checks trace inflated estimates to conflations of all ACA IT spending, state exchange grants, and political rhetoric rather than a single HealthCare.gov construction contract [1][2][3].
5. Measurement problems explain most of the disagreement
Differences in totals stem from what reporters or analysts include: only CMS’s HealthCare.gov contracts, the broader set of federal ACA IT and state‑exchange grants, the costs to run back‑end hubs, or later maintenance and cloud expenses; each produces a different number and no single public ledger aggregates every possible line item into a universally accepted “cost to build” [4][8][1].
6. Politics and narratives shaped the public impression
The HealthCare.gov saga became a political cudgel: opponents used worst‑case, aggregated figures to underscore incompetence, while administration defenders emphasized the benefits and savings tied to ACA implementation; think tanks and partisan outlets framed the cost to support broader arguments about the law’s merits, which helps explain why figures vary widely in public discourse [9][4][2].
7. Bottom line for the question “How much did it cost to build the Obamacare website?”
Based on government inspector‑general reporting and independent audits, the defensible estimate for the federal HealthCare.gov site’s development and post‑launch remediation is in the ballpark of $1.7 billion to just over $2 billion; lower published figures reflect partial accounting and the $5 billion number is not supported by documented contract or audit totals [3][4][1][2].