Vice President JD Vance announced Tuesday that the Trump administration has recovered $2.2 billion in Obamacare fraud by cracking down on ineligible enrollees, calling the abuse a direct driver of rising health care costs across the country. The announcement came at a press conference in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus.
This is much worse than anyone expected and there’s probably more fraudsters who just haven’t been caught yet.
Vance said the Biden administration loosened eligibility requirements for the Affordable Care Act while failing to verify whether enrollees actually qualified, and simultaneously paid brokers to sign people up. “You have a system where, on the one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system, while on the other hand, the government isn’t even checking whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program,” he said. “What do you have? Of course, rampant, rampant fraud.”
Vance Frames Fraud as a Child Health Care Crisis
To illustrate the scale of the problem, Vance drew a direct comparison to children’s health benefits. “The average American child receives about $4,000 in healthcare benefits every single year,” he said. “That means that we are saving 550,000 American children’s worth of healthcare that was going to fraudsters and now will go to the essential services for which it was meant to go.”
The administration is taking several steps to address the problem, including ending enrollment for 750,000 people believed to be fraudulently signed up. An additional 419,000 people face further verification to confirm they are legal U.S. residents and meet income thresholds for the program’s subsidies. Vance also linked the broader fraud to inflation, arguing that channeling hundreds of billions of dollars to ineligible recipients drove up prices for everyone. I absolutely think that it increased inflation as well,” he said. You can read more about the Obamacare fraud crackdown in the original report.
Dr. Mehmet Oz Warns Fraud Could Destroy the Program
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz warned that unchecked fraud poses an existential threat to the program itself. “Fraud will destroy Obamacare,” Oz said. “You cannot run an insurance business if you have no idea who’s coming in. You can’t rate how sick they are. You have no idea if they’re real. It throws all of your numbers up.”
Oz also disclosed that a group he described as “Soros-funded” has filed 150 lawsuits against the government’s efforts to verify enrollees and recently won a ruling that blocks officials from checking the tax returns of people on Obamacare. “You could be a billionaire and get Obamacare, at least for a while,” he said. “That’s how you destroy a system.”
And when it comes to most Americans, they probably want Obamacare destroyed because it likely ruined their previous insurance arrangement.
What Comes Next for Enrollment Verification
Vance responded sharply to the litigation, saying he could not understand why anyone would use personal wealth to prevent basic eligibility checks on programs that Americans depend on. “It’s just a sick, sick use of charitable dollars,” he said. “What a scandal that is.”
The administration has not specified a timeline for completing the verification of the 419,000 flagged enrollees, but officials indicated the process is already underway. Oz also pointed to expanded use of Obamacare’s choice program for small employers in states including Georgia, Indiana and Connecticut as a path forward, provided fraud is brought under control.
