Falling short of real reform, Republicans' American Health Care Act, as originally submitted, not only recycled ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion (leaving that for the next Congress to deal with) and mandated coverage of pre-existing conditions, but it left in place ineffective ObamaCare “safeguards” against benefits going to ineligible people — including those in America illegally.

“The bill's authors said they were counting on the Trump administration to plug the gaps,” The Washington Times reports.

Out of the box, the bill should have detailed tougher safeguards, not left better eligibility enforcement to Cabinet departments that could be under a different presidential administration come 2021.

To verify eligibility for tax credits toward health-insurance premiums, the GOP bill relied on the same verification procedures used for ObamaCare exchanges' premium subsidies — procedures so loose that “only those who acknowledged that they weren't citizens were subjected to legal status checks. If applicants said they were citizens, even if it wasn't true, they were able to sign up,” The Times reported.

And according to Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., as of 2015, about $750 million in ObamaCare subsidies had gone “to people who failed to verify their citizenship or legal status.”

Those are 750 million reasons why it's incomprehensible that Republicans, who've had seven years to work on their ObamaCare replacement, somehow overlooked this gaping — and costly — eligibility loophole.

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