by Ben Whedon
Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday announced a major crackdown on fraud linked to the Obamacare exchanges, saying that the government would remove roughly 750,000 people from the system.
“We are stopping Obamacare enrollment for about 750,000 people who we believe are fraudulently enrolled in the program,” Vance said. He also announced additional verification efforts for another 419,000 people to confirm their residential status and income eligibility.
Vance added that the United States government found a “fraud ring that had 40 brokerage agents who had funneled 50,000 people into the Obamacare system fraudulently.”
“Many of those people quite literally didn’t even exist. 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. This was a scandal,” he added.
In the same event, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz also announced a “temporary national moratorium” on new Obamacare brokers for several months.
The crackdown comes as Vance ramps up the anti-fraud task force, which has identified billions in misused federal funds. Trump named Vance as the administration’s “fraud czar” earlier this year.
In response, Senate Democrats said on social media, “Instead of making health care harder to access, we should be making it more affordable and protecting coverage for the millions of Americans whose lives depend on it—Senate Democrats will do just that when we take back the majority.”
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Ben Whedon is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
