I wonder how many jobless Americans are aware that their tax dollars went to a Canadian firm to build the HealthCare.gov website. CGI Federal is the IT company that built most of Healthcare.gov.

You may remember that the shell of one of Obama’s campaign bus was manufactured in Canada. That may have been a legitimate out-of-country purchase because of the needed specifications.

CGI Federal is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian firm CGI Group. Lydia Phillips, writing in the Washington Post, notes that CGI Federal sees

“the U.S. federal government as their area of biggest growth. CGI Federal’s health-care practice has grown 90 percent year over year, largely due to the Healthcare.gov project. And for a contractor, ballooning projects are a good thing. ‘In the Federal Government business, we continue to see more extensions and ceiling increases on our existing work, while we further leverage our position on contract vehicles,’ said CEO Michael Roach on their latest earnings call. Those ‘contract vehicles’ now amount to $200 billion, which Roach later referred to as a ‘hunting license.’”

Roach went on to say that he continues to view the “U.S. Federal Government as a significant growth opportunity” with $8 billion in the pipeline for future orders.

Are we to believe that there is no company in the United States that could have built the HealthCare.gov website?

The site cost just under $100 million to construct. Companies that know how to work the system get the projects. They know that government money is not the same as private capital. When it’s not your money that’s being spent, there is little regard for cost.

“The biggest problem with Healthcare.gov,” Serdar Yegulalp of InfoWorld writes, “seems simple enough: It was built by people who are apparently far more familiar with government cronyism than they are with IT.”

There is almost no accountability in government work. Few people ever get fired. When a system fails, more money is allocated to fix it. Think public (government) education. As test scores go down, the call to spend more money goes up.