RIGHT SPEAK: The Money Pit: Obamacare Overhead is $2,500 Per Newly Insured Enrollee

Last August, officials in the nation's capital decided to spend $6.4 million hiring 150 "trained experts," or navigators, to help uninsured residents of Washington, D.C., to sign up for ObamaCare.

By mid-April, just 10,714 people had signed up for a private ObamaCare plan through the D.C. exchange. Nobody knows how many of them previously went uninsured. But even if every one had insurance — and paid their premiums — the cost still works out to $597 in spending per enrollee.

While ObamaCare was sold on the premise that it could cut health costs, the results of the first open enrollment show that, even with 8 million people signed up, doing so turned out to be hugely expensive.

In D.C., the navigator grants were just the tip of the spending iceberg. The federal government handed D.C. officials $133.6 million to build their own exchange and another $631,000 in grants to health centers to help sign people up.

All told, that works out to more than $13,123 per ObamaCare exchange sign-up.

Hawaii was even more expensive. Just 8,592 Hawaiians signed up via its state-built Hawaii Health Connector site, despite $205 million in federal exchange grants and another $1.6 million in health center grants. That translates into $24,080 per enrollee.

Vermont's program cost $4,440 per sign-up. Even in California, which has signed up 1.4 million, the overhead cost was $776 each.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts and Oregon are both scrapping their exchanges after getting a total of $491 million in federal grants to build them.

All told, the federal government handed out $3.9 billion in grants to 14 states and D.C. to build their exchanges, and another $827 million in grants to states that in the end decided not to build one. It spent another $64 million in grants to health clinics to encourage enrollment in those states. That's an average $1,850 per enrollee in these 15 markets.