Congress must fix Obamacare’s stunning fraud risk now

Boy does Obamacare leave the door wide open for fraud.

Instead of demanding hundreds of billions more in taxpayer subsidies for the failing program, Democrats should be insisting on a redesign to stop it from collapsing.

The Government Accountability Office this week shared the results of covert testing it’s been doing these last two years: Turns out that a full 90% of fake applications for the “bonus” subsidies that Dems want extended got approved —despite missing “required” documents to support claimed Social Security numbers, citizenship or reported income — and were still getting subsidized as of September.

These sham enrollees were able to land insurance subsidies to the tune of nearly $10,000 a month.

To try to preserve that status quo, Democrats just gave us the longest government shutdown ever.

Beyond, the GAO showed that it’s safe to sign up with the Social Security Number of a dead person — or enroll multiple folks under the same SSN.

In 2024, nearly 68,000 SSNs were used to receive more than one year’s worth of insurance coverage.

In another single year, just one SSN was reused on more than 125 different policies, amounting to over 71 years of “coverage.”

Turns out the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversee the Obamacare marketplace, don’t block a number already in use: No guarding at all against identity theft or other scams, because it might stop someone from getting coverage — as if a simple appeals process couldn’t work.

Overall, fraud, waste and abuse within the Obamacare system now runs an estimated $27 billion a year; no wonder premiums have shot up 129% since 2014, far faster than private insurance costs.

Because the law that created Obamacare banned whole categories of insurance that used to serve people’s needs, an ever-growing number of Americans are forced to rely on these policies — yet the whole system is propped up by toothpicks even as it’s plagued by sky-high denial rates and subpar care.

Yet Democrats’ only answer is to throw more cash at it.

Whatever Washington opts to do in the short term to keep the program running, Congress has to get serious about deep reform — and about reopening the alternatives that the Affordable Care Act outlawed.

Give Americans enough lifeboats to escape this Titanic before it sinks.