I (everyone) deserve better service with $1500 huge charge

[kateg]

So you are saying they are actually going easy on us with the application fees!?

Yes.

It's interesting you are using US health care system as an example. That is for universal use for a population 10x our size.

It is, but in terms of functionality it takes just as much work to build an application that works for 1,000 people as 1,000,000. The difference between the two is the amount of work to get it to scale. The UI still has to be written, the logic still has to be there, the integration still has to be done with other services, the security still has to be handled, etc. On top of that, small services in many ways have fewer economies of scale. If you have a separate database server, cache server, and frontend (for example), the frontend may not be under particularly heavy load. This means that you have 1 server per 100 users, instead of per thousand users you would have if you were handling more users.

We are talking about just an immigration program for one province in Canada. That's gotta be a factor of 100 between those two?

Ontario takes their immigrants seriously:

http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/budget/ontariobudgets/2015/ch1a.html

Successful integration of immigrants into Ontario’s workforce is vital for the province’s continued economic success. This is why Ontario continues to support various settlement and integration programs, including Ontario Bridge Training, with an investment of more than $63 million between 2013‒14 and 2015‒16. To date, the Province’s bridge training projects have targeted more than 100 occupations, helping close to 50,000 highly skilled immigrants.

A key objective of Ontario’s Immigration Strategy is to help immigrants and their families settle and achieve success. Ontario has invested $17.8 million over the past two years in the Newcomer Settlement Program, helping more than 80,000 newcomers each year access the services they need to settle in Ontario.

So, they spend more than 30 million dollars a year on immigrants, and they charge you $1,500 to apply. To be revenue-neutral (not make a dime) they would need to charge 20,000 people application fees. They have numerous specialty systems built, to serve 5,200 nominees. If the total costs exceed 7.8 million dollars, then the application fees for those 5,200 individuals won't cover the cost of the system and the salaries.