WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has yanked 750,000 Obamacare enrollees off the federal health insurance exchange over suspected fraud — saving taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion — and are reviewing the status of another 450,000, Vice President JD Vance announced Tuesday.
The sweeping action removes roughly 3% of registrants from the health insurance subsidies program, which boasted 23 million enrollees this year, while opening the door to further cuts.
“We are stopping Obamacare enrollment for about 750,000 people who we believe are fraudulently enrolled in the program,” Vance said at the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“Those 750,000 people are people that we feel confident either don’t know that they’re enrolled in the program, aren’t using the program at all, are unaware of it, or … are potentially phantom people.”
Vance, the chairman of the administration’s anti-fraud task force, claimed some of the affected people are likely “enrolled against their will” or “maybe they don’t even exist — it’s just a person who exists on paper who was created to defraud the American taxpayer.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief, also announced a six-month moratorium on new insurance brokers and agents enrolling Obamacare customers, while showing off a photo of a convicted fraudster with a “punchable face.”
“Fraud will destroy Obamacare. You cannot run an insurance business if you have no idea who’s coming in,” said Oz, who added that he had no doubt the correct names were being yanked from the rolls.
“We have been writing them, Telexing them, you know, walking to them, FedExing, whatever we could possibly do to get into touch with them. They won’t answer, and they have never filed a claim,” he explained.
“So it meets all the criteria for us, as much as any government can say, ‘You actually don’t know you have this or you don’t exist.’”
Oz said the other 450,000 enrollees under scrutiny “had something about their story that was a little bit different than what we expected from the 100% fraud story.
“So we’re giving another chance to them to be able to try to tell us that they really have a Social Security number or they really did have the insurance.”
Vance previously announced the withholding of low-income Medicaid reimbursement money from 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.
Trump has vowed to gut Obamacare if Republicans retain control of Congress following the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
“We call it the great healthcare plan to stop all government payments to the big insurance companies,” Trump said this month 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.”
