WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance will make an announcement on Obamacare fraud Tuesday morning at the White House, The Post has learned — after launching crackdowns that restricted funding for other federal healthcare programs.
Vance has focused heavily on alleged theft of taxpayer money in multibillion-dollar medical programs in his role as Trump’s fraud czar — generally coupling allegations with action to block the distribution of funds deemed at-risk for misappropriation.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration turns up the heat on President Barack Obama’s namesake health insurance overhaul, with President Trump vowing earlier this month to “stop all government payments to the big insurance companies” if Republicans retain control of Congress.
The precise content of Vance’s remarks, including possible federal action, was not immediately clear, though congressional investigations have revealed significant alleged fraud in the signup process for subsidies under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Vance previously announced the withholding of low-income Medicaid reimbursement to states for certain programs deemed at high risk of fraud, imposed a moratorium on durable medical equipment providers for the old-age Medicare program and suspended 447 purported hospice providers in California.
A December report from the Government Accountability Office, a legislative agency, found that as of 2024 66,000 Social Security numbers were enrolled in multiple Obamacare plans — with one used for 125 policies.
Roughly $94 million in federal subsidies were dispensed for plans created with a dead person’s Social Security number, that investigation found.
The GAO further found an estimated 160,000 tax-credit applications may have been charged by insurers without a taxpayer’s authorization — and that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services logged in an eight-month span 270,000 complaints from people enrolled in or changed to plans they didn’t want.
A third of tax credits in 2023 reportedly were not checked against a person’s income.
Vance’s announcement follows Trump’s threat to turn the screws on insurance companies if the GOP holds the House and Senate in the Nov. 3 election.
“We call it the great healthcare plan to stop all government payments to the big insurance companies,” Trump said in a Sept. 9 speech at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. “The insurance companies own the Democrats. They own them. And [we will] give the money directly to the people for you to go out and buy your own healthcare.”
Trump previously said he wanted to haul insurance CEOs to the White House to force them to lower costs — after successfully pressuring prescription drug companies to lower rates paid by Medicare and Medicaid, aligning them to prices paid by eight other high-income countries.
