While more and more Americans question whether Obamacare will provide them with anything other than a raw deal, the latest Bloomberg Businessweek documents one group that’s bound to benefit: consultants.
After the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, Kevin Walsh hit the road. A senior vice president at Xerox (XRX), he saw that state governments would need a lot of help figuring out how to make sense of Obamacare, so he went looking for customers. The company had recently moved into health services with expectations of using its technological expertise to expand in the growing industry, which accounts for 18 percent of the nation’s economy. Walsh’s team visited every state to learn how they were planning to roll out their insurance exchanges. “It was almost like we were building a new business,” he says. Xerox won more than $200 million in IT contracts from seven states.
The news recently has focused on the few dozen companies responsible for building the disastrous federal health-care exchange website; but they’re just a handful of the hundreds of companies quietly cashing in on Obamacare. Consultants such as Deloitte and tech companies including Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) are advising government agencies, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and employers on implementing the law. Thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act, health-care advice is now a $10.2 billion industry that’s expected to grow 6 percent annually over the next five years, according to research firm IBISWorld. “The status quo is not the status quo anymore,” says Tami Simon, a managing director at Buck Consultants, a health-benefits adviser Xerox bought in 2010. “This is the biggest change in the health and welfare world in decades.”
