Poll after poll shows Americans are nearly unanimous in their frustration with the cost of health care—and according to a recent editorial in American Thinker, they have every reason to be. But the outlet argues the real culprit isn’t the free market; it’s the government interventions that have distorted it for decades.
Writing for American Thinker, S.T. Karnick points to the latest development in the federal government’s efforts to root out fraud in the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplace as fresh evidence that the system is fundamentally broken by design. The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, led by J.D. Vance, announced the discovery of 760,000 fraudulent accounts in the ObamaCare system. Canceling those accounts, according to the task force, will save American taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion.
“We are announcing $2.2 billion in American taxpayer money that we’re saving by doing what should have been an obvious thing,” Vance wrote on X last week, as quoted by American Thinker. “We’re actually making sure that the people receiving ObamaCare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them.”
Karnick argues that these phony accounts represent just a sliver of the broader fraud problem plaguing federal health care programs. He cites the National Health-Care Anti-Fraud Association’s estimates that annual fraud ranges from $100 billion to more than $300 billion. That staggering figure, he contends, is not an anomaly but a predictable outcome of a system in which government spending invites abuse and the incentives for exposing fraud are weak.
A System Designed to Fail?
The editorial’s central thesis is that fraud, rising health care costs, and public dissatisfaction with the supposed failure of markets are all interconnected symptoms of the same root cause: government intervention. Karnick argues that government policies have massively increased incentives for people to consume health care while simultaneously suppressing the supply of services—driving prices up and transferring wealth from health care providers to insurance companies.
He points to the promises made by proponents of the Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010. Backers said it would lower prices for everybody. But as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has noted, and as Karnick quotes, “that law’s command-and-control regulations drove industry consolidation and pushed up prices instead,” with premiums for employer plans roughly doubling since 2010 and rising at about twice the rate of inflation.
The expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare is another target of the editorial. By loosening eligibility standards, the program drastically increased the number of people on taxpayer-funded coverage. According to Karnick, Medicaid cost federal and state taxpayers $949 billion in fiscal year 2024—an increase of 51 percent since 2019.
And the pain extends beyond government programs. Karnick notes that ObamaCare’s creation of a parallel insurance system ended up doubling the price of employer-provided health insurance premiums, which were supposedly unrelated and unaffected. The average deductible for those plans, he adds, doubled over just the past decade.
Meanwhile, the law’s thicket of mandates on health care delivery and payment systems—ostensibly designed to keep costs down—suppressed innovation while prices and fraud skyrocketed, according to the editorial.
The Biden Expansion and the Fraud That Followed
Karnick places particular emphasis on the ObamaCare enrollment surge during the Biden administration. He cites a Western Journal report noting that enrollment increased from about 10 million people to more than 22 million. A Department of Health and Human Services report issued this year estimated that nearly half of new ObamaCare enrollments during Biden’s time in office were fraudulent.
If that estimate holds, Karnick writes, there could be as many as five million additional fraudulent ObamaCare enrollees yet to be identified from the Biden-era expansion alone. He notes that Congress and President Biden expanded enrollment radically beginning in 2021, even though the nation’s poverty rate had been falling since 2014—a detail he presents as further evidence that the expansion was not driven by genuine need.
The editorial argues that the structure of the system practically invites fraud: the money comes from the federal government but is administered by the states. Events since January 2025, Karnick writes, have vividly demonstrated that many states are in the habit of letting ineligible people receive taxpayer money from across the country.
He also makes a broader point about incentives within government itself. Spending invites fraud because the rewards for theft are high, while the payoff for government bureaucrats who expose fraud is more likely to be harassment or termination than a promotion or a pat on the back.
A Constitutional Argument
Karnick then pivots to what he considers the foundational issue: the constitutionality of federal health care spending itself. He argues that all federal health care spending is unconstitutional because the Constitution does not grant specific authority for this purpose and because such spending does not promote the general welfare—it promotes the individual welfare of those designated to receive benefits.
The Founders, he writes, understood the temptations of government spending, having read the lessons of history. That is surely one reason they authorized federal spending only to “provide for the common Defence and General Welfare of the United States,” not of individuals.
This argument, Karnick acknowledges, contradicts what he says the American people have been propagandized into believing for well over a century. But he insists it is a crucial point that deserves to be taken seriously.
As a practical matter, the editorial contends that the federal government’s intrusion into the provision and purchasing of health care has corrupted the system completely, making it inefficient and unfair by diverting gargantuan amounts of money into it while piling on new rules every year to correct its mistakes—thereby creating further problems.
What Comes Next?
Karnick concludes that ending the direct fraud the task force found is only a start toward reestablishing constitutional rule of law and repairing what he calls a rapidly deteriorating health care system. He goes further, arguing that the entire government health care apparatus is a destructive fraud—and that an honest Supreme Court would strike it down as unconstitutional, an honorable Congress would repeal it, and a law-abiding president would refuse to administer it.
The editorial reflects a longstanding conservative critique of the Affordable Care Act and government involvement in health care more broadly. Supporters of the law have long argued that it expanded coverage to millions of Americans who previously lacked insurance and that its subsidies are essential to making coverage affordable. They have also pointed to fraud prevention efforts and program integrity measures as evidence that the system can be managed responsibly.
But for Karnick and like-minded critics, the latest fraud findings are not an aberration—they are a feature of a system that was flawed from the start. The $2.2 billion in savings announced by the task force is a drop in the bucket, he suggests, compared to the hundreds of billions lost annually to fraud and the trillions spent on a health care apparatus that he believes should not exist in its current form.
With polls showing persistent public anxiety over health care costs, the debate over what to do about it is unlikely to cool. The question, as Karnick frames it, is whether Americans will continue to look to government for solutions or will begin to see government itself as the problem.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/obamacare-fraud-indicts-the-entire-system/