By Zachary Stieber
Contributing Writer
Health officials poring over death records and other data have recently found that 189,000 people were improperly enrolled in subsidized Affordable Care Act coverage despite also being enrolled in a government insurance coverage program or being dead.
Officials with the Department of Health and Human Services and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services division reviewed data and identified the duplicative enrollments, as well as dead people being insured, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials said during a briefing in Washington on Wednesday.
Insurance companies, brokers and agents profit from the double-enrollments, not the people themselves, officials said. Individuals in many instances do not know they are double-enrolled.
People identified as being enrolled in marketplace coverage under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and a government program such as Medicare are notified. They’re given 30 days to provide evidence to resolve the allegations. The estates of people who come up as deceased are also given 30 days to respond.
After the resolution process, officials this year removed from Obamacare 58,000 people who already have Medicare, CMS Deputy Administrator Peter Nelson said during a press conference in Washington. Another 11,000 subsidized plans were ended for dead people.
Nelson projected the removal of an additional 3,500 deceased individuals by the end of October.
The removals will prevent an estimated $738 million in improper subsidy payments this year, and $1.5 billion each year moving forward.
“We will follow the evidence, correct mistakes and pursue fraud whenever we find it,” Kennedy said during the briefing.
Approximately 19.2 million Americans were enrolled in Obamacare exchanges, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a June report. Some 21.8 million marketplace enrollees were receiving subsidies in the form of tax credits in 2025, KFF estimated.
The people who are removed from Obamacare do not lose insurance because they maintain Medicare, Medicaid, or Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage, the department said. The government pays for all or portions of those insurance programs.
Periodic checks by exchanges are required to try to identify dual enrollments. The examinations were conducted at least twice a year during the first Trump administration, but were paused during the Biden administration, officials said on Wednesday. They resumed in 2025.
That year, the government ended dual enrollment for about 551,000 individuals already covered by the Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicaid, officials said. The number was lower this year because “when you check, the system gets cleaner,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz told reporters.
The removals are also separate from the recently announced purging of 760,000 accounts that were for people who do not exist or were not eligible for coverage.
“We’re actually making sure that people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,“ Vice President JD Vance, chairman of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, said at the time. ”Amazingly, we weren’t doing that before.”
