(Reuters) - The U.S. government effort to set up state-run health insurance exchanges may be falling behind schedule, but technology firms are lining up for the lucrative contracts to build the network's infrastructure.
Less than a dozen states are far enough along in planning insurance exchanges mandated by the U.S. healthcare overhaul to bid out contracts, but many of the biggest names in IT are jumping on those contracts and positioning for more, according to industry and government officials.
They include Hewlett Packard Co, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Dell Inc, Computer Sciences Corp, eHealth Inc, Ceridian Corp, Xerox, IBM, Oracle and smaller peers.
IT executives say the value of such contracts could run between $5 million and $100 million per state, depending on how many functions the exchange will perform. Even the most bare-bones option could take up to a year of construction.
"There isn't a Microsoft Office for exchanges... This is really uncharted territory," said Jordan Battani, a researcher with IT and systems integration giant CSC. "Everybody thinks there's a pony for them in this."
The healthcare law passed last year requires all states by 2014 to have exchanges, open marketplaces where uninsured people and small businesses can compare and buy insurance.
States now have less than 17 months before they must present their plans for how they will run those exchanges to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which has given out millions in grants toward that effort. Otherwise, HHS will have to create the exchange itself.
Either way, tech companies will benefit from the system to be used by millions of Americans.
"The healthcare law actually creates full employment opportunities for the IT sector and the legal sector," said one healthcare industry source who declined to be identified because the person was not authorized to publicly discuss the financial nature of the exchanges. "Ancillary players are going to be making the real money."
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