Government Accountability Office decided to see if anyone's actually watching the store. So they made 20 completely fictitious applicants - no real people, no documentation, just testing if the system would notice.

18 of them are still actively covered. September 2025. Monthly payout: over $10,000. GAO's just...monitoring them.

Because apparently nobody at HHS has.

No SSN? Fine. No proof of citizenship? Whatever. No income documentation? Come on in. GAO literally wrote in their report: "[We] did not provide documentation yet received coverage."

They're not even hiding it - they got benefits with nothing. The system just said yes.

Now check the real-world damage. In 2023, 29,000 Social Security numbers somehow got used for multiple full-year coverage plans.

By 2024? That jumped to 68,000. Someone's running the same number through the machine twice, three times, however many times it takes, and the alarms aren't going off.

Then there's the $94 million that went to dead people in 2023. Not "accounts tied to people who died recently and the paperwork hasn't caught up" - straight up deceased recipients.

Death certificates filed, funerals held, checks still clearing.

But here's the really wild part: GAO tried to track $21 billion in subsidies from 2023 back to actual Social Security numbers. Couldn't do it.

21 billion dollars just floating out there with no clear connection to who's supposed to be getting it.

The system allows multiple enrollments per SSN "to help ensure actual SSN-holder can enroll in cases of identity theft or data entry errors."

In other words: we built in workarounds so generous that fraud looks identical to legitimate use.

Now Congress is fighting over whether to extend these enhanced COVID subsidies past December 31. Cost to keep them? $30 billion annually.

24 million people enrolled, over 90% getting subsidies. Without extension, premiums spike overnight and 22 million people might lose coverage.

Republicans looking at GAO's findings saying: this is exactly why we shouldn't pour another $30B into a system that can't tell fake accounts from real ones.

Democrats saying: you're going to kick 22 million people off insurance because less than 1% is fraud?

Both sides kinda have a point. Yeah, the fraud's under 1% of total enrollees.

But when you're burning $30B yearly and literally cannot verify where $21B went, "less than 1%" stops sounding so minor.

Senate vote coming this week. Expected to fail. Which means scramble for short-term extension, fight continues into 2026 budget battles, and absolutely nothing changes about fraud controls.

Because here's what nobody wants to say out loud: the system isn't designed to catch fraud.

It's designed to maximize enrollment.

When your mandate is "get people covered," asking too many questions becomes the enemy. Verification slows things down.

Documentation creates barriers. Better to let a few fake accounts slip through than risk denying real people who need coverage.

So GAO's 18 fictional enrollees will keep collecting their $10K monthly until someone at HHS manually shuts them down.

Which requires someone at HHS to actually read GAO reports.

Which requires someone at HHS to care more about fraud than enrollment numbers.

Don't hold your breath. By next year, GAO will run the same test. Find the same results. Write the same warnings.

And Congress will have the same fight about whether feeding money into a system that can't track where it goes is compassionate policy or expensive theater.

Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a completely imaginary person just got their subsidized premium renewed for 2026.

Source: Fox News