It sounds high to me too and I'm was on the team that rebuilt the login system. From what I know about it - we knew how much it cost us[0] and didn't have the support and maintenance contract figured out yet so we reported out 4 to build and no more than 4 to maintain and the number has kind of stuck.
I would say that I (very naively) thought that it would be easy peasy to rebuild all of healthcare.gov. I was wrong. There are all sorts things that make it much harder than you'd expect in a private sector environment.
I do think that there are probably ways to get this cost even cheaper - however, from a software profiling perspective, moving it down an order of magnitude or two is a huge win and that it's a pretty clear choice between further optimization compared to an order of magnitude change on a VA, immigration, or other system.
[0] I'm not actually sure how exact this number is either - lots of help required from people from all different contracts - so this is an upper bound estimate
I would say that I (very naively) thought that it would be easy peasy to rebuild all of healthcare.gov. I was wrong. There are all sorts things that make it much harder than you'd expect in a private sector environment.
I do think that there are probably ways to get this cost even cheaper - however, from a software profiling perspective, moving it down an order of magnitude or two is a huge win and that it's a pretty clear choice between further optimization compared to an order of magnitude change on a VA, immigration, or other system.
[0] I'm not actually sure how exact this number is either - lots of help required from people from all different contracts - so this is an upper bound estimate