Top Obamacare officials told a Senate panel Thursday that they can’t guarantee that the government ever will recover billions of taxpayer dollars loaned to health insurance “co-ops.”

“Today’s hearing is about the families who lost their health care plans, it’s about the taxpayers who were swindled, it’s about the bureaucrats who mismanaged this program, and it’s about the local governments who had to cut budgets from firefighters and schools to make up for Washington’s failures,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said.

During the hearing, held by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations within the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, senators paid particular attention to the 12 of 23 ObamaCare co-ops that have failed.

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