APNewsBreak: Undercover govt investigators re-enrolled fictitious persons for health benefits

Congressional investigators say phony applicants that they signed up last year under President Barack Obama's health care law got automatically re-enrolled for 2015 and some were rewarded with even bigger taxpayer subsidies for their insurance.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office says 11 counterfeit characters that its investigators created were automatically re-enrolled by HealthCare.gov. In Obama's terms, they got to keep the coverage they had.

Six of them were later flagged and sent termination notices. But GAO said it got five of them reinstated, using more bogus information. The five even got their monthly subsidies bumped up.

HealthCare.gov does not appear to be set up to detect fraud, GAO said in testimony for a Senate committee. A copy was provided to The Associated Press.