Warren Buffett partnered with Quicken and Yahoo! to create a website designed to enroll up to 15 million people over a matter of days to participate in a March Madness $1 Billion Bracket Challenge (odds to win: 128 billion to 1). In October of 2013, the Obama administration launched a website that cost hundreds of millions and was years in the making that couldn’t handle 50,000 concurrent users two months after it went live.

After years of preparation and hundreds of millions thrown at the project, Healthcare.gov launched on Oct 1, 2013 only to face-planted in front of the entire nation, crashing with only a fraction of the number it was designed to be able to handle. What followed over the next few months was an embarrassing series of revamps and reboots that resulted in little improvement.

In the first month of its launch, only 40,000 to 50,000 people enrolled via Healthcare.gov, in part due to its chronic dysfunction. In December, the site was still frequently crashing and had the capacity to handle only 50,000 concurrent visitors, what it was supposed be able to handle when it launched Oct 1 and something the administration was actually touting as impressive two months after the launch. Even in December, the administration was force to encourage users to visit the site on low-traffic off-hours.

This level of dysfunction came at a staggering cost. Sebelius testified in October that the administration spent around $120 million on the website itself, with another $56 million in “supportive infrastructure,” but many analysts believe that number to be over $400 million.

Compare those numbers to Buffett’s $1 Billion Bracket Challenge, which aims to enroll as many as 15 million people in a matter of days for what was certainly a tiny fraction of the cost. Is the comparison fair? Yes and no. Sure, the site does not need to orchestrate with several government departments and its functionality is far simpler, but the site’s concurrent visitor capacity is yet another example of the free market showing bureaucratic-controlled enterprises what efficient and effective use of resources and personnel looks like.