In an effort to limit medical insurance scams, the Trump administration removed thousands of enrollees from Affordable Care Act plans, claiming many received subsidies they didn’t qualify for and that some enrollees didn’t exist.
Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz teamed up on a broader push to root out fraud in government health programs, and roughly 760,000 people have had their ACA coverage canceled. The administration did not provide details about who lost coverage or how those individuals were inform
The cuts, Vance said, would save U.S. taxpayers $2.2 billion.
“These programs are deserving, they are important, but they’re not going to exist unless we stop the fraud,” Vance said at a news conference.
During the Biden administration, ACA enrollment increased from about 11 million to a record 24 million, when pandemic-era enhanced tax credits expanded subsidies. ACA enrollment declined by roughly 3 million people this year after those enhanced subsidies expired, making monthly premiums significantly more expensive for millions of people.
In Southern California, eight defendants were arrested in a hospice-related health care fraud case involving more than $50 million in alleged losses. “The United States loses hundreds of billions of dollars annually to healthcare fraud at the expense of all American taxpayers, whose benefits decrease as premiums, co-payments and taxes grow,” said Akil Davis, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “We aim to reverse that trend with ‘Operation Never Say Die’ and others like it.”
Oz claimed that some of the enrollment increase — around 4 million to 5 million — has been driven by fraud, particularly by insurance brokers, who help people find and sign up for health plans.
“In fact, the fact that we have 23 million makes me think we have too many participants in the ACA,” Oz said at the time. “It’s too high of a number.”
Oz reiterated his claim during the news conference Tuesday, saying, “Obamacare had 10 million enrollees from 2015 to 2020. During Covid, it went up to 22 million people.”
“So the question becomes, what happened?” he said. “Well, the guardrails were weakened, and the prior administration decided not to enforce the weakened guardrails.”
The DOJ charged a record 455 defendants — including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals — in schemes involving over $6.5 billion in alleged false claims. While these are separate scams, both have made the Trump administration and the FBI crack down on healthcare fraud as a whole.
