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
It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?
It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly.
By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses.
The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
