How to Fake an Application and Get a Healthcare Insurance Subsidy (A Guide for Illegals so that US Taxpayers Pick Up the Tab)

WSJ has the blow-by-blow:

The people running ObamaCare set low expectations and then consistently fail to meet them, but could the expectations at least stop plunging? Witness the recent “secret shopper” audit that unmasked the entitlement’s wide-open exposure to fraud and the lack of any plan to prevent it.

Last year the Senate Finance Committee asked investigators at the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to test the Affordable Care Act’s internal eligibility and enrollment controls. So they created a dozen fictitious identities and applied for insurance subsidies—and 11 fake claimants got them.

The GAO didn’t know ObamaCare’s verification protocols in advance, so they weren’t trying to exploit some known security hole. Online or over the phone, they simply supplied invalid Social Security numbers, doctored citizenship status or misstated their income on tax documents.

The federal exchanges paid some $2,500 a month or $30,000 per year to each John Doe. When it came time to re-enroll at the end of 2014, the 11 fake applicants were able to extend their plans and, in some cases, even received more generous subsidies without providing additional documentation.

The exchanges are supposed to verify income and identity because the dollar value of subsidies is tied to those data. If people can burn taxpayers for money they don’t qualify for, ObamaCare will be far more expensive than it has already become.

Yet the GAO notes with its dry wit that “we circumvented the initial identity-proofing control,” though the exchanges are “required to seek post-approval documentation in the case of certain application ‘inconsistencies.’” The GAO also reports that the follow-up was often unclear or inaccurate and didn’t turn off the subsidies. The GAO even includes transcripts of their sleuths bluffing the clueless customer service reps.