The Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud estimates it could save taxpayers $1.5 billion annually by removing individuals who were enrolled in both Obamacare and Medicare or Medicaid programs.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced on Wednesday that his team identified roughly 70,000 deceased individuals enrolled in Obamacare subsidized health insurance and another 120,000 people who were enrolled in both Obamacare and a state-run Medicaid program.
“This is not today overt fraud,” Oz said at Wednesday’s press conference. “This is sloppiness that happens when you’ve got hundreds of millions of people trying to get insurance.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration temporarily suspended periodic data matching in federally funded health insurance programs, which Oz described as a “routine cross-reference check to make sure Americans aren’t funding duplicate policies for the same patient.”
Last year, Oz and his team identified roughly 550,000 people who were enrolled in a state Medicaid program and an Obamacare plan. Eliminating duplicative enrollments for those individuals saved taxpayers approximately $4.4 billion, Oz said.
This year, Oz said the numbers are “certainly trending in the right direction” but there is still work to be done.
Oz said living patients who were identified as enrolled in both Obamacare and a state’s Medicaid program were contacted by CMS and given 30 days to respond as to which plan they would like to keep. If they did not respond, Oz said patients were kept on Medicaid so they were not responsible for co-pays and tax compliance requirements to stay on a subsidized Obamacare plan.
“These 120,000 people kept their insurance in one of those two programs, generally Medicaid, the whole time, and we canceled the duplicate policies so that no taxpayers were on hook for it,” Oz said.
Democrats have hammered Republicans during the 2026 election cycle for implementing cuts to federal insurance programs such as Medicaid, saying that spending reductions to the social safety net programs will result in the public losing essential benefits.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said multiple times during the press conference that no person lost health insurance coverage as a result of the CMS actions.
“We’re cleaning up the mess,” Kennedy said. “But the objective is not to take people off the rolls. The objective is to preserve these rolls for the people who desperately need them.”
Kennedy also said patients do not benefit from duplicative enrollments, but insurance companies, managed care organizations, and insurance brokers have a “big advantage” in shielding the abuse in the system because they “are getting paid double.”
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said, “Rich insurance companies and unscrupulous brokers were the only beneficiaries of this.”
“Not a single American patient was benefiting from the problem we are fixing today, not one,” Ferguson said. “I will tell you who was benefiting though: insurance agents and insurance companies were reaping billions of dollars.”
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Ferguson said identifying waste and fraudulent payments is critical to prevent insolvency in social safety net programs.
“The only way to save these programs, the only way to make sure that they’re going to be around for future generations, so that they can benefit from the bargain that we all made, which is people will pay into these systems and they will be there for them at the end, is if we fix the program integrity problems,” Ferguson said.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
