Vice President JD Vance announced Tuesday that the Trump administration has recovered $2.2 billion in Obamacare fraud after tightening verification of who actually qualifies for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.
Speaking at a press conference in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Vance said the Biden administration had loosened eligibility rules for the program while failing to check whether enrollees actually qualified, all while paying brokers to sign up as many people as possible.
“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. What do you have? Of course—rampant, rampant fraud,” Vance said.
The administration is ending enrollment for 750,000 people it believes were fraudulently signed up, and is running additional verification checks on another 419,000 enrollees.
“We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits,” Vance said.
He put the $2.2 billion figure in perspective by noting the average American child receives about $4,000 in health care benefits annually. “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,” he said.
Fraud Driving Up Costs, Vance Says
Asked by Breitbart News whether the fraud is making health care more expensive for ordinary Americans, Vance didn’t hedge: “Well, it’s definitely making health care more expensive, for a couple of different reasons.”
He said fraudsters are pulling resources away from doctors, nurses and honest brokers actually providing care. “I think it’s a huge insult to all the amazing doctors, to the honest insurance brokers who are out there, to our nurses and everybody in our hospitals that they’re working their fingers to the bone,” he said, adding that people gaming the system “are making more money than them, not because they’re providing a useful service to a sick person, but because they’re defrauding the government. That absolutely makes things more expensive.”
Vance also tied the fraud to broader inflation, calling it “one of the underappreciated and under-told stories of the Biden administration’s inflation crisis.” He argued that pumping hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into fraudulent claims added inflationary pressure on top of being “a moral travesty.”
Oz: Fraud Could Sink the Program Entirely
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz warned that unchecked fraud threatens the survival of Obamacare itself. “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 said.
Oz pointed to a choice program already running in Georgia and Indiana that is expanding to Connecticut, letting small employers opt into private alternatives. He said fraud undermines that effort too. “Small employers will not use Obamacare if they think that one-third of the people are fraudulent, because they don’t want to join a club that’s going to sink, and you wouldn’t join it either,” he said.
Oz also said what he described as a “Soros-funded lawfare group” aligned with the Democratic Party has sued the administration 150 times over verification efforts, and recently won a case blocking officials from checking the tax returns of Obamacare enrollees.
“Obamacare is for people making between one and four times the poverty level. They never said in the law that we needed to check the tax return because that’s self-evident in the law. We are now blocked from checking tax returns on Obamacare recipients, which means you could be a billionaire and get Obamacare, at least for a while. You can make no money and get Obamacare. That’s how you destroy a system.” — Dr. Mehmet Oz
Vance responded by criticizing the funding behind the lawsuits. “I struggle to understand the mindset and the psychology of a person who makes billions of dollars in the greatest country in the history of the world, and decides to use that money not to maybe provide health care to people who need it, but to ensure that we’re unable to check the eligibility criteria for programs that American people depend on,” he said. “It’s just a sick, sick use of charitable dollars.”
