What do you get when you combine a lack of transparency with a lack of accountability in a massive federal government spending program?

If you said at least $250 billion in fraud and waste, you’re right! Nashville’s WZTV reports:

In fact, when the Government Accountability Office set out to deliberately scam the Department of Health and Human Services’s Healthcare.gov website and various state-run health insurance marketplaces to see if they could get away with Obamacare subsidy fraud, their sting operations were successful 91% of the time.

The funny thing is that this whole situation could have been avoided by having people who buy health insurance through the federal and state “marketplaces” pay the full price for the coverage they chose to buy and provide any tax-credit subsidy for which they might be eligible by adjusting their federal income tax withholding – effectively putting extra money in their paychecks each month while automatically providing for an audit of the tax-credit subsidy they received when they next file their income tax returns.

But unfortunately, that would have meant being transparent and honest about how much the health insurance policies would really cost, which was the last thing the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to do.