Obamacare will cost taxpayers plenty, say supporters of the perversely misnamed “Affordable” Care Act, but, hey, it costs money to expand coverage to many more people.

Perhaps, though all this cost so far has produced a grand total of 2.6 million previously uninsured people signed up on the government-controlled “exchanges.” What is now coming to light is just how badly those exchanges are working – especially the ones that some states set up on their own.

Four of them are “now in shambles,” as even the Obamacare cheerleaders at Politico are putting it. Massachusetts, Oregon, Nevada and Maryland are trying to figure out how to repair their failed exchanges — after spending a combined $474 million of federal taxpayers’ money on setting them up. That wasted money is just the start, Politico reports:

“The $474 million spent by these four states includes the cost that officials have publicly detailed to date. It climbs further if states like Minnesota and Hawaii, which have suffered similarly dysfunctional exchanges, are added.”

And you’ll be paying for it:

“The federal government is caught between writing still more exorbitant checks to give them a second chance at creating viable exchanges of their own or, for a lesser although not inexpensive sum, adding still more states to HealthCare.gov.”

What’s more, the figure in Politico may be low, reports Phil Kerpen in the Federalist. For one thing, it doesn’t include federal money the failed-exchange states already have received but haven’t spent:

“It is highly likely the states will keep the full amounts, because there is no obvious mechanism, unfortunately, to force them to return the funds. Consider Oregon, which has about $57 million remaining. Ace reporter Chelsea Kopta of KATU – which has owned the Cover Oregon scandal story – immediately asked Oregon’s state CIO Alex Pettit about the unspent funds when the state exchange voted to shut down. His answer? They’re keeping it all.”

They’re keeping the money, and all the rest of us get is the memory of their ads promoting the now-failed exchange:

Kerpen adds up the federal taxpayer money spent on failed exchanges and some other states whose exchanges seem to be in trouble. The total: $1.2 billion. For comparison, that’s about the total annual budget of the Milwaukee Public Schools, for example, or nearly as much as the federal government spent on veterans housing programs. Instead, taxpayers spent it on nothing of value, as these exchanges failed.