Is it just me, or does even the 'bargain' price of $647/enrollment from the federal website... seem surprisingly bizarrely high? (by an order of magnitude or more)?<p>But I'm not really sure exactly what to compare it to as 'typical' for website costs. Any ideas?<p>And of course, presumably (hopefully) the cost will continue to be amortized over the next few years -- more money will surely have to spent on it (continually), but the overall cost per enrollment should theoretically go down, as the initial work continues to be used for more and more enrollments. At least theoretically; in reality, who knows.
In other news: Dozens of insurance companies got 8.1 million signups and got the tax payer to fund the marketing campaign and the website that brought the customers to their doors. These insurance companies should be grateful but instead are being dicks about it.<p>The U.S. government should bill the health insurance companies for the cost of the websites.
That number seems ridiculously high, but shouldn't CPA be calculated from the money spent on "acquiring" the user, not the entire cost of starting the business?
This seems kind of a dumb analysis since you will be signing people up for years and it will only get cheaper. If it didn't get cheaper it would be scandalous. This article also seems like a win for federalism. Hawaii's exchange is really expensive. California's isn't as cheap as the Federal Government but it was way more reliable. Having alternatives lets you compare how programs are performing.
Nowhere in the article is the cost of "acquiring" a user, or CPA mentioned. This article is speaking in regards to the total cost of "signing up an enrollee". That is a fairly broad term, and could use some clarification for it to be of any real use.
Being quite familiar with some of these projects I'd been saying this for quite a while. I'm glad to see that someone has come out and evidenced it.
I'd like to see what the projected ongoing costs are for enrollees that continue in the system for the next year. Surely, the cost of maintaining an enrollee is substantially lower?
Does anyone have (finally?) a good explanation as of why a Canadian company was given the task to create the hc website? Especially since they screwed up in the UK so bad they been basically barred from Gov. contracts?
For the record, I don't think this is a good way to judge value (at this point, certainly). But it does seem more odd to argue the program had a good ROI based on such a cost.
CPA is ~meaningless when the 'acquisition' is mandated by law. It's not like there is any competitive "choice" here. this is simply y taxes spent divided by x people impacted by the law (who have complied). This is basically asking what is the "cost of user aquisition" for an IRS audit.<p>[edit: CPA reference was deleted by mods> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716613" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7716613</a> . NB: The "cost of signing up an enrollee" is logically consistent with the context; whereas "user acquisition cost" is really out of place in the context of compelled behaviour (ie, individual mandate).]