WASHINGTON — The White House Fraud Task Force is canceling government healthcare payouts for 189,000 people who were double-dipping on subsidies under the Biden administration, The Daily Wire first reported.
According to the outlet, the task force will announce Wednesday morning that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has canceled Obamacare subsidies for 189,000 individuals who also held Medicare or Medicaid coverage, or who were listed as deceased. The move is expected to save taxpayers more than $1.5 billion annually.
The cancellations stem from the resumption of a process called Periodic Data Matching, which cross-checks enrollment records to flag duplicate coverage. A White House official said CMS had stopped checking for duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare enrollment between 2021 and 2024, allowing a backlog to build. When President Trump took office, officials found 551,000 instances of duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare enrollment waiting to be reviewed, according to that official. The administration says it saved nearly $4.4 billion in 2025 through such verification efforts, a figure that CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz placed closer to $6 billion in his comments to The Daily Wire.
How the cancellations are carried out
Under the current protocol, CMS contacts anyone whose records suggest duplicate coverage and asks them to confirm whether they do, in fact, hold two forms of government-backed insurance. If the individual responds within 30 days stating they do not have duplicate coverage, CMS will not end their subsidies. If the person fails to respond, CMS will cancel their subsidies — and if they are enrolled in Medicare, CMS will also cancel that coverage, a White House official explained. A similar process applies to people flagged as deceased.
The administration maintains that CMS is following a rigorous process to ensure individuals do not lose insurance coverage as duplicative policies are canceled. The agency’s stated aim is to remove overlapping payments, not to strip coverage from people who are legitimately enrolled in a single program.
Fraudulent dual enrollment in Obamacare alongside Medicare or Medicaid typically occurs in one of two ways, per the reporting: a person misrepresents their income to secure low-cost private insurance while retaining government healthcare, or insurance brokers steal the information of low-income Americans and sign them up for coverage without their knowledge. The latter scheme has been a focus of the task force’s broader crackdown.
Oz: Biden administration ‘sleeping on the job’
Oz, the CMS administrator, framed the pause in data matching as a lapse in oversight. “When it comes to program integrity, the Biden Administration was sleeping on the job,” Oz told The Daily Wire. “They paused looking for duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare coverage for four years, creating a backlog of hundreds of thousands of duplicate enrollments.”
Oz added that the administration has “already saved nearly $6 billion” and will “continue to work hard to restore taxpayers’ confidence that the programs they fund are spending their hard-earned dollars wisely and efficiently.”
The White House official described the Biden-era pause as “selective ignorance,” pointing to rising Medicaid rolls during the same period. The official said the Trump administration resumed the verification process from day one.
The announcement follows an earlier action last month, when the fraud task force moved to shut down 750,000 Obamacare enrollments it identified as fraudulent. That effort included a crackdown on insurance brokers and agents the White House suspects of abusing the program. Vice President JD Vance addressed the matter at a press conference, saying, “We’re actually making sure that people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren’t doing that before.”
A growing focus on program integrity
The latest round of cancellations fits into a broader push by the administration to tighten verification across federal health programs. Periodic Data Matching, the tool at the center of the effort, is designed to catch overlaps between the private insurance marketplace and public programs like Medicare and Medicaid — overlaps that can occur through error, omission, or deliberate fraud.
For now, the administration is touting the cancellations as a straightforward matter of fiscal stewardship. The White House official said the verification process will continue, with more reviews expected as the backlog is worked through. Whether the cancellations prompt pushback from enrollees who believe they were wrongly flagged remains to be seen; the 30-day response window is built into the protocol precisely to address such cases before subsidies are terminated.
The Daily Wire’s reporting indicates the task force will formally announce the figures Wednesday morning. Neither CMS nor the White House has publicly released the full list of affected enrollees, and the agency has not detailed how many of the 189,000 cases involve deceased individuals versus living beneficiaries with duplicate coverage.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-white-house-shuts-down-fraudsters-double-dipping-from-government-healthcare