‘Plagued By Fraud’: One Million Obamacare Enrollees Have No Social Security Number
Millions of Americans are fraudulently enrolled in Obamacare, taking billions of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets, according to new reports from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Concerns are being raised about potential fraud in the Obamacare health insurance program, as reportedly 1 million accounts have no corresponding Social Security number. It is estimated that around 2.6 million people have fraudulently enrolled in Obamacare plans this year.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy said Obamacare is “plagued by fraud” during a June 27 video. They blamed the Biden administration and “partisan lawfare” for enabling the fraud.
The lack of Social Security numbers is a “glaring warning sign of fraud,” Kennedy said.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, blamed insurance agents for gaming the system.
“They submit applications for fake people, enroll stolen identities, all to collect millions of dollars in improper fees from insurance companies for ‘selling plans’ they never legitimately sold,” Dr. Oz said.
Kennedy explained how the “fraudsters” intentionally pick zero premium plans so that the enrolled never see a bill and never raise questions.
Oz said that insurance agents must now provide Social Security numbers for enrollees. Kennedy said they have stopped thousands of potential fraudulent enrollments and are trying to cancel current plans that may be fraudulent.
“If you steal from the American taxpayer, or if you defraud American families, HHS will find you, and we will hold you accountable,” Kennedy warned.
.@DrOzCMS and I are exposing how bad actors exploited the Obamacare marketplace by enrolling people without proper verification and profiting at taxpayers’ expense.
The Trump Administration is taking decisive action to stop these corrupt schemes, recover taxpayer dollars, and… pic.twitter.com/ea5dN31S9n
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) June 27, 2026
Obamacare has been rife with fraud, as is expected with any government program that includes lucrative subsidies.
A report from the Paragon Health Institute estimated that about 6 million enrollees in Obamacare in 2026 were fraudulent. “These improper enrollments could lead to as much as $25 billion in improper subsidy expenditures in 2026, nearly one-quarter of projected federal exchange subsidy spending,” the think tank reported. (A June 26 report from Health and Human Services similarly estimated there were 5.6 million “improper, phantom and fraudulent” enrollees in 2025).
Like Kennedy and Oz, the think tank warned of “phantom enrollees.”
“In 2024, 35 percent of exchange enrollees and 40 percent of fully-subsidized low-income enrollees generated no medical claims—double the percentage expected in a normal health insurance market,” the think tank found.
A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found “large-scale failures,” including “fake identities,” “stolen Social Security numbers,” as well as “incorrect income estimates” for recipients of Obamacare subsidies, according to Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID).
The June 26 report from the Trump administration estimated there are currently 2.6 million fraudulent applications overall.
“The Trump Administration remains committed to aggressively rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to protect Americans from unscrupulous brokers using their information to secure payments from the federal government and safeguard the program’s long-term stability for those that depend on it,” the report on Obamacare enrollment concluded.
Matt Lamb currently works as an associate editor for The College Fix. He also contributes to a variety of websites, including Legal Insurrection, Human Life Review, and AMAC Newsline. His work has been published by The Federalist, Townhall, and The Daily Caller. He has worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.
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Comments
Shut it all down!!!! Every single outlay of government funds seems to be gamed by someone somewhere so stop outlaying funds until you can do so with minimal chance of fraud. And for God’s sake raise the penalties for defrauding the American people. I don’t care how many prisons they have to build to house all the miscreants.
. . . or how many tents are needed to house the bastards .
The system wasn’t supposed to work or be corruption-free. It is working as designed: 1 to provide loads of freshly laundered money to democrat operatives and 2 to crash the economy, paving the way for a Marxist/ Maoist takeover.
Working.
Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to establish a corps of “navigators” to push enrollments? Seems like a recipe for skimming and diversion of funds.
Exactly. In our practice, we have come across a number of people who were shocked to find that they were “double-covered” through both their employer (or spouse’s employer) and an Obamacare exchange plan that they had no idea existed. The worst part is that the exchange plan was difficult to cancel, and in many cases caused hardships for those patients because their treatments were delayed by the labyrinth of approvals and denials in coordinating those coverages. A good deal of it was direct fraud by brokers, insurance companies, and fraudsters who had stolen identities.
For months I was getting Obamacare mail addressed to a very odd Hispanic name. I would line out the bar code for the address, write “Return to Sender, Not at this Address” on the envelope and send it back. My wife and I own our home and have been here for eight years, and the addressee almost certainly isn’t related to the person we bought the home from, so I doubt the addressee ever lived here.
I called the number at healthcare.gov and reported it the first time it happened. They said they would take care of it, but the mail kept coming. I looked the guy up only to discover he was incarcerated.
I then reported it to the FBI and the OIG, Within a couple months the mail stopped.
Of course, it could have been an address error, but I doubt it. More likely is some unscrupulous insurance agent enrolling this person without their knowledge. As for healthcare.gov and my related phone call, my sense is they drag their feet on issues like this, because Obamacare depends on the maximum possible number of enrollees for it to be “affordable.”
I wonder how long this kind “Affordable” Care Act fraud has been going on. In the early days, not enough people were signing up to make the plan affordable, so some of you may remember the ad with Pajama Guy sipping coffee and signing up for Obamacare. I wonder what its premiums would be if the fraud was eliminated. Likely a lot less “affordable.” Even more concerning is the idea the program, being of liberal design, was designed and administered to turn a blind eye to fraud given its success is dependent on the number of enrollees.
Most concerning is this is only one liberal program among countless other liberal programs where the theme is the same.
And we can also thank Roberts for the continuing blight that is Obamacare. Quite a historical reign as chief justice, derelict in his constitutional duty by allowing this monstrosity of a statute to endure followed up with the obliteration of American citizenship and sovereignty. It’s probably not apparent because I hide it so well but i don’t really like Roberts all that much.
“If you steal from the American taxpayer, or if you defraud American families, HHS will find you, and we will hold you accountable,” Kennedy warned.
Until the Democrats return to power, and then the money spigots will again open wide to socialist parasites both foreign and domestic.,
Yep. Though, it might be the case that the d/prog figure out the corruption scandals reduce the level support for the various programs to exist and some of their politicians begin to make tentative steps to weed some of it out . Not very likely but it is possible,.especially when/if they continue to bleed support among the working class across demographics who don’t appreciate illegal aliens and fraud rings siphoning off benefits intended for ordinary Citizens.
I’d expect no less from a scam concocted by, and named after Monkey.
That sort of comment accomplishes nothing.
Criticize the program for its own flaws.
A racist comment is always unsuitable. But when a program has flaws it is valid to also criticize the creator of the flawed program. It is just that such criticism should be on substance not identity.
The program is the work of the semi anthropoid
Generally, I’d agree. But G. W. Bush was often compared to monkeys and chimpanzees. I don’t see why we should allow our opponents to dictate to us what sorts of insults are off-limits, especially when they’ve used a particular class or category of insult themselves. Does it have racial connotations? Yes, it does. Is it a fact the humans are the descendants of apes? Yes, it is. It is no crime to remind people that particular individuals sometimes seem more closely related to our remote ancestors that to the rest of the (human) race, for one reason or another, especially when the individual is a trickster or trouble maker (troublemaking, aka “monkey shines”) These connections are in the vernacular with no racial connotations at all. And so what if there are racial connotations? White people are regularly denigrated for being white, and calling out a white person as white is not meant to be kind when it is used by certain other persons. “White” has become a pejorative. But some can use racial pejoratives while others can’t? I reject the claim.
Chimpy McFlightsuit was bandied about Fark.com back in the day.
It’s just unbearable ,the fraud and hatred for this Country
By people in elected office no less
The center will not hold
Who is the fraudster? Who is writing checks to whom? A consumer with a zero rate plan simply writes no checks, no? It is not like someone is writing checks to the consumer. So how can the consumer be the fraudster?
I suppose an insurance company could be the fraudster if they get a federal subsidy for a non-existent insured person.
The article tries to explain (not entirely clearly) that the actual consumer whose name is on the plan is not even informed of it –- someone harvests his identity and files under his name.
This is the same type of fraud as the election fraud where Democrats complain that “there’s no proof of illegal aliens actually voting.” But there is proof that other people fill out ballots in that person’s name and submit them. James O’Keefe has already documented similar operations.
Would it be possible for a lay person to open a clinic, hire no doctors or professional staff, and to then generate bogus insurance claims in order to get federal money (from, say, Obamacare)? If so, then who knows how many “Medikel Centers” may be out there.
Well, of course it is. The Somalis in Minnesota did exactly that for learing centers and home healthcare centers, and another crowd in California did exactly that for hospices. So sure, it’s possible, because it’s already happening.
Billions and billions in fraud, yet I’m told repeatedly by the Marxist left that I’m not paying “my fair share”? They can go pound sand.
Kennedy & Oz look like Saturday Night Live caricatures of themselves. It’s difficult to take either of them seriously; charlatans the both of them.
Obamacare is far too great an infringement upon our liberties to have these two clowns in charge of tearing the entire rotten edifice down. I personally will not be satisfied until Obama’s name is stricken in embarrassment for the traitor that he is. His attempt to socialize medicine without calling it that is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
His being elected TWICE is indicative of the intelligence of the American people.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
My mother was fooled by Obama the first time, but not the second. Still, I was surprised. She probably felt she had little choice with McCain as the alternative.
I didn’t vote for either. And no, I did not waste my vote. I only waste my vote when I use it to vote for someone I really don’t think would make a good POTUS and/or would be bad for America, so I voted for neither of them.
“Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they choose evil.”
Hannah Arendt
Yet another fraud built on the Demsocialist effort to remove positive ID from everything (except the DNC convention) to enable the power grab and kickbacks they are infamous for.
“Obamacare” was built on lies (see Jonathan Gruber) and perpetuated by lies. And we foot the bill.
Maybe the taxpayers can refuse to pay using whatever excuse Obama is using not to pay his minority contractors….
Fraud is baked into every government program
Try and find 1 that it isn’t
Democrats must be furious……they hate it when this administration finds millions in fraud, that they are responsible for.
The solution to fraud in government programs like this is to end the program altogether.
Government should not be involved with healthcare/health insurance in the first place.
Easy answer: find it in the constitution as a delegated power.
It isn’t there. Along with at least 80% of crap the government is now doing.
I can’t even see patients unless they present proper identification, whether they are using insurance (which my office staff tells me absolutely requires a social security or “tax identification” number) or paying cash (good luck finding any of those!). I can’t speak to how 1 Million names are enrolled into Obamacare policies without SSNs, except to say I wonder how many of those policies were issued through USAID-backed illegal alien education programs through NGOs?
I’m a physician and I have paid cash for doctors visits for myself and my wife.
Sometimes the out of pocket expense for going out of network is greater than just paying for the office visit.
Same with mri’s
sometimes the co-pay is more than just paying for the scan yourself
What a huge surprise … NOT! It’s not even close to surprising that the government shows so much incompetence
Simple solution to the matter. Cancel the accounts and plans of all those that have no corresponding Social Security number. Problem solved. Why is this so hard for them to do is beyond me.