Vice President JD Vance and other Trump administration officials announced Tuesday that the federal government is removing more than 750,000 people from their Affordable Care Act coverage.
The individuals set to be removed from the marketplace were fraudulently enrolled, Vance said. Some insurance brokers will also be suspended over accusations that they erroneously enrolled the individuals.
“We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have health care,” Vance said at a news conference Tuesday. “This was a scandal.”
The Wall Street Journal first reported the enforcement action.
Trending
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, who runs the agency responsible for enforcing ACA eligibility requirements, announced that there will be a national moratorium on adding any additional brokers to the ACA program for six months.
“We do not feel at all conflicted about that decision because most of the fraud, a disproportionate amount of the fraud, is taking place from these individuals,” Oz said.
The vice president described one instance where the taskforce discovered a ring of 40 broker agents who had allegedly fraudulently funneled 50,000 people into the ACA.
Vance announced the move as part of his anti-fraud task force, which the White House claims has uncovered more than $200 billion in fraud since its inception in March.
The Washington Sun reported last week that the White House’s Fraud Ledger included misleading and unsubstantiated claims, and the government did not provide details about how it calculated the massive clawback of fraudulent funds.
The task force discovered everything from “multinational criminal syndicates” to “small-time hoodlums” involved in this process, Oz said — adding that it’s an “open secret” that the fraudsters have been able to use the program “as a piggy bank.”
The Government Accountability Office, an independent agency that conducts research for Congress, found in a July report that CMS needed stronger controls to “protect consumers from unauthorized activity by unscrupulous agents and brokers.”
Rooting out corruption has become an increasingly popular campaign issue ahead of the midterms, as both parties try to cast themselves as being tough on fraud in government programs.
President Donald Trump has targeted the ACA, also known as Obamacare, since his first term — though he has never been able to follow through on his promises to successfully shut down the program. The late Republican Sen. John McCain famously cast the deciding vote against repealing Obamacare when a “skinny repeal of the program” came before Congress in 2017.
In Trump’s second term, the administration has tightened eligibility and enrollment requirements, including additional income verification and tax filing requirements to receive premium subsidies.
ACA enrollment has subsequently fallen sharply and is estimated to continue on a downward trajectory, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, an organization focused on health policy research and reporting.
Author
