When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz announced that roughly a million people had been enrolled in Obamacare plans with no Social Security number attached, the figure landed like an immigration scandal. It is something worse.
The number is not primarily a story about who slipped onto the rolls. It is a confession about how the rolls were built, and about an architecture the previous administration engineered to be impossible to audit.
CMS identified, in its words, 1 million highly suspicious agent and broker assisted enrollments through HealthCare.gov with no Social Security number on the application and no premium being paid. Read that again. The common thread is not a border. It is a broker.
Insurance agents and brokers earn between five and thirty dollars per member per month, and by 2024 they were steering 78 percent of all marketplace sign-ups, up from 55 percent three years earlier. Hand a salesman a commission for every warm body he enrolls, strip away the requirement that the body verify its own identity, and design the plan so the enrollee never receives a bill that might tip him off. What did anyone expect would happen? The program was not defrauded despite its rules. It was defrauded because of them.
The fraud left fingerprints, and the report lifts them cleanly. If a million people are enrolled in coverage they never sought, the simplest tell is that they never use it. Sure enough, 40 percent of enrollees in zero-premium cost-sharing plans filed no medical claims whatsoever in 2024, roughly double the rate for plans carrying even a token premium. People do not pay for insurance they forget they have, and they do not visit doctors under a policy they never knew existed.
The second fingerprint appears the moment a bill arrives. When phantom enrollees were automatically rolled into plans that finally charged a premium, the share who failed to pay jumped from a historical norm of 18 percent to roughly 50 percent across 2024 through 2026. A ghost cannot write a check. The brokers, meanwhile, had already collected.
CMS says it has already cleared about 2.9 million of them from the books while estimating that 2.6 million remain, the equivalent of roughly $10 billion a year siphoned from taxpayers between 2021 and 2024. (Read more: Patriot.tv, 6/28/2026) (Archive) (h/t X22Report)