WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance, in response to a question from Breitbart News, said Tuesday that fraud is “definitely making health care more expensive,” while Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz said, “Fraud will destroy Obamacare.”
At a press conference in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, Vance announced that the administration has recovered $2.2 billion in fraud in Obamacare—also known as the Affordable Care Act—by ensuring that only those entitled to Obamacare subsidies receive them.
Vance said the Biden administration relaxed eligibility for the Obamacare program, but failed to verify enrollees’ eligibility, while simultaneously incentivizing brokers to enroll people in the program.
“You have a system where, on the one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system, while on the other hand, the government isn’t even checking whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program. What do you have? Of course—rampant, rampant fraud,” he said.
Vance said the Trump administration is taking multiple actions to combat Obamacare fraud, including ending enrollment for 750,000 people believed to be fraudulently enrolled.
“The second thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to do some additional verification. We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled, but we’re going to do some additional verification on about 419,000 people,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
“To put into context the amount of money that we’re stopping from going to fraudsters today—$2.2 billion—the average American child receives about $4,000 in healthcare benefits every single year,” he added. “That means that we are saving 550,000 American children’s worth of healthcare that was going to fraudsters and now will go to the essential services for which it was meant to go.”
Vance took questions after announcing the war on Obamacare fraud, and Breitbart News asked what this fraud means for affordability and whether it is actually making health care more expensive.
“Well, it’s definitely making health care more expensive, for a couple of different reasons. Number one, you have a lot of people in the healthcare system who engage in productive provision of health care to our fellow citizens, making people get well when they feel sick, doing preventative treatments, and so forth. Instead of doing that, they’re trying to milk the system. They’re trying to defraud the system,” he said.
“And I think it’s a huge insult to all the amazing doctors, to the honest insurance brokers who are out there, to our nurses and everybody in our hospitals that they’re working their fingers to the bone. Some of these guys have very long shifts; they’re working very hard in the healthcare system, and meanwhile, there are people who are making more money than them, not because they’re providing a useful service to a sick person, but because they’re defrauding the government. That absolutely makes things more expensive,” he added.
Vance also said the fraud affects general cost inflation
“The other way is just general cost inflation. When you take $2 billion, again, that’s 550,000 children’s worth of health care, and you take that money out of the system and put it into fraud—that raises costs for everybody,” he said.
“I do think one of the underappreciated and under-told stories of the Biden administration’s inflation crisis—again, the worst inflation in 48 years under Joe Biden’s presidency—is because we were taking hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer and we were giving it to a bunch of fraudsters,” the vice president continued. “We know that printing and spending money like that increases the pressure on inflation. The fact that we were printing that money not to the benefit of American citizens, but to the benefit of fraudsters—it’s both a moral travesty, but I absolutely think that it increased inflation as well.”
Oz jumped in and emphasized that “fraud will destroy Obamacare.”
“You cannot run an insurance business if you have no idea who’s coming in. You can’t rate how sick they are. You have no idea if they’re real. It throws all of your numbers up. All of the insurers are concerned about this, and there’s a big opportunity for us to roll out Obamacare for private companies, small employer companies who want to use the choice program that … we’ve done in Georgia and Indiana, going to Connecticut, the red and blue states like these,” Oz said. “Small employers will not use Obamacare if they think that one-third of the people are fraudulent, because they don’t want to join a club that’s going to sink, and you wouldn’t join it either. So … the affordability is a big problem, but it destroys something that we could salvage.”
He also said that what is believed to be a “Soros-funded lawfare group” has sued repeatedly to prevent the government from checking tax returns of people enrolled in the program.
“And Mr. Vice President, I haven’t talked about this with you, but there is a, we believe Soros-funded… lawfare group—it’s an aligned group with the Democratic Party—who has sued us 150 times on these issues. They just won a suit… that blocks us from checking the tax returns of people on Obamacare, and just process that,” he added. “Obamacare is for people making between one and four times the poverty level. They never said in the law that we needed to check the tax return because that’s self-evident in the law. We are now blocked from checking tax returns on Obamacare recipients, which means you could be a billionaire and get Obamacare, at least for a while. You can make no money and get Obamacare. That’s how you destroy a system, and it’s a choice, as Chairman Ferguson said, and the wrong choice is being made by some Americans.”
Vance then excoriated Soros.
“Just on that point, Dr. Oz, I mean, I struggle to understand the mindset and the psychology of a person who makes billions of dollars in the greatest country in the history of the world, and decides to use that money not to maybe provide health care to people who need it, but to ensure that we’re unable to check the eligibility criteria for programs that American people depend on,” he said. “It’s just a sick, sick use of charitable dollars. What a scandal that is, and thank you guys for fighting it in court and getting back to a point where we can do the commonsense thing, which is check whether the people who get your tax dollars actually are entitled to get them.”
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