"s it just me, or does even the 'bargain' price of $647/enrollment from the federal website... seem surprisingly bizarrely high? (by an order of magnitude or mo

"s it just me, or does even the 'bargain' price of $647/enrollment from the federal website... seem surprisingly bizarrely high? (by an order of magnitude or more)?" Welcome to government contracting. The few who play the game basically get away with whatever they want. It is quite ridiculous. The cost is only going up now that states are essentially pot committed. After the initial disastrous implementations across the board I doubt anyone is in a hurry to try that again. I have the original CA proposal. $360,334,374.00. I’m sure there is at least another $50,000,000 in contract mods. The waste is just unreal. Creating local jobs? Not tech ones. The site was done in India. Something like this sounds like a very good use case or AWS or another cloud service given the enrollment periods. Of course there is no profit in that. From their proposal: “As discussed in Section 2.5.1 Hosting, we plan to implement a Private Cloud type infrastructure for CalHEERS. Why Private Cloud? Since standard cloud offerings, available from Amazon, Verizon, and a number of other service providers, offer sufficient capacity and are immediately available, they may seem like a good answer. However, standard enterprise-level cloud-based solutions currently focus on commoditized functions such as ERP, CRM and to a lesser extent HR and payroll. While SLAs are offered for security and availability, they do not meet the Exchange’s requirements for secure, SLA-based data intensive operations”. The solution? 1,714 cores, 9,394GB of RAM, 392,327GB of Storage over 249 virtual machines. Every single piece of software is Oracle with the exception of Adobe LiveCycle. Even with an average billing rate of $150/hr, more processing power then most Top 100 sites on the Internet…. they couldn’t keep a fail whale page online let alone any functionality. Once it is finally somewhat usable they are treated like a raving success and awarding with… the federal contract. Quite a business.