Duplicating that return might be tough for public stock investors. But Psilos co-founder Al Waxman said they could do worse than buy stock of big benefits consultants like Towers Watson, Aon and others.
"They're all rushing to get into this business," Waxman said.
Waxman noted that those companies already have significant, long-standing relationships with companies that might shift their workers to private exchanges.
"These people can control a lot of lives in the corporate world," Waxman said.
Steve Kraus, vice president of Bessemer Venture Partners, which has an undisclosed stake in private-exchange operator Liazon, said he expects some companies whose sole business is operating private exchanges to go public over the next couple of years. Liazon, whose BrightChoices Exchange has employees from more than 2,300 companies enrolled, has not announced any plan to go public.
Kraus also said, "I actually don't rule out a surprise entry" into the private-exchange business.
"Think about some of the large marketplaces based in Silicon Valley that are all about consumer service. This is just another marketplace," Kraus said.
He said companies that already sell "books, electronics, food on-line," could view private exchange insurance as big potential opportunity that would leverage their existing skills of offering customers products with competing price points in an attractive, easy-to-navigate Web platform.
"I know that some of the big retailers, I've heard that Costco, Wal-Mart, Target, they've all looked at the health-care space," Kraus said.
Another possible opportunity for investors from the private-exchange trend is in selling short the stocks of big insurance companies, said Richard Evans, health-care analyst for Sector and Sovereign Research.
Evans noted that giant insurers like Cigna, Aetna, Wellpoint and UnitedHealth "have a lock on these big employers" who offer workers health coverage. As a rule, employers will offer plans from just one insurer to workers.
"If the big employers throw all their beneficiaries in the exchanges, then these beneficiaries are a jump ball now," Evans said, noting that the insurers would then have to compete on price for the workers.
That would be likely to drive premiums prices—and insurers' profits—down, Evans said.
(Read more: The "Expedia" of health care: start-up rides Obamacare wave)
Another stiff hit to insurers' bottom line would come from the tendency of purchases in private health exchanges to buy plans with significantly lower premium prices—and higher deductibles and co-pays—than what their current company-offered plans cost, Evans said.
But in the long term, Evans said, one or more of the big insurance companies could look at the writing on the wall and realize that they need to get in the private exchange business themselves to offset the competition.
"These guys have a system advantage that would be staggeringly difficult for anyone to overcome," Evans said.
"If I had to guess right now, it'd be Cigna" that would be first to get into the business of operating a private exchange. "UnitedHealth would be second," with Aetna and Wellpoint less likely to jump quickly into the sector, he said.
—By CNBC's Dan Mangan. Follow him on Twitter @_DanMangan.
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