Even companies that primarily sell software to the US Government don't get software like margins. Functionally, the business of selling software to the US Gover

Even companies that primarily sell software to the US Government don't get software like margins. Functionally, the business of selling software to the US Government scales like plumbing and not like commercial/consumer software. A plumbing business can only stack so many plumbing jobs into its plumbers, so to scale it needs to hire more plumbers. Most software businesses scale beautifully because the first copy is really expensive and all future copies are somewhere between free (distributed over the internet) and very cheap (shrink-wrapped box with a CD inside). But software companies that sell to the US Government are actually selling developer time to the US Government, not finished products. So that scales with the number of developers you can hire. And that actually makes sense. Even for something like hospital management, the government is going to be different. Epic's EHR system can sell to bunches of hospitals and amortize most of their development work across all of those hospitals- there is only VA system and it is very different from how even a large hospital system functions (no insurance claims! lifetime tracking!), so adapting it is going to be painful.