> It just seems a shame that a country that somehow can't afford to pay for the health care of it's citizens manages to lose track of literally trillions of dollars.

Its not trillions of dollars. Its trillions of dollars of adjustments, when you count the absolute value of all the adjustments to individual accounts. But that's -- as stated in the article -- in part because not only does every error involve at least two accounts, but also because the accounts are nested, so most adjustments in a detail account also involve adjustments in several parent accounts.