First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
Nearly 200,000 people are still collecting taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies while already covered by Medicare or Medicaid — and some of them are dead. That is what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week, saying his department's restarted enrollment checks uncovered the duplicate enrollments and is canceling them, a cleanup he says will save taxpayers $1.5 billion a year.
The money never reached patients. Obamacare subsidies are paid as advance tax credits straight to insurance companies, so every duplicate enrollment meant a monthly taxpayer payment to an insurer for somebody who was already covered — or no longer alive.
“Each of these figures represents a payment that would otherwise have gone to an insurance company, NOT to an American citizen.”
The duplicates piled up after the Biden administration paused the routine cross-checks between marketplace enrollments and the Medicare, Medicaid and death records from 2021 to 2024, while pandemic-era policies kept enrollments rolling automatically. Kennedy's team restarted the checks, matched the rolls against the other programs, and began stripping out the duplicate subsidies.
Critics warn that aggressive purges can sweep up eligible people caught in paperwork mismatches and cost families their coverage. The administration says the cancellations target only confirmed duplicates — people who already hold other coverage, or who have died — and are part of restoring basic verification to the program.
The cleanup is separate from September's CMS crackdown on brokers who switched or enrolled people without their consent, which covered 760,000 unauthorized enrollments and $2.2 billion, and it lands as part of the administration's wider push against improper payments across the federal health programs.
The cancellations proceed as the cross-checks continue, with HHS projecting the savings at $1.5 billion a year once the duplicate payments are fully stopped.
Never miss a story.
Join our Telegram channel and get every article link the second it’s published.
Join Telegram Channel