The Trump administration pulled 760,000 Obamacare enrollments last week. Called it fraud. JD Vance's task force says this saves $2.2 billion in subsidies. That's roughly $2,894 per fake person. Seems low for the effort of inventing three-quarters of a million human beings, but what do I know about the going rate for fictitious insurance beneficiaries.
760,000 enrollments. Gone. Like they were never there. Which according to the task force, they weren't. Someone had to create these profiles. Enter the data. Navigate the healthcare.gov interface, which anyone who's used it knows is designed like a DMV website from 2004 had a baby with a lobotomy patient. But sure, fraud rings did this 760,000 times because the $2,894 payout per fake enrollment was just too lucrative to pass up.
The task force has a name: White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Not the Department of Fraud Prevention. Not the Office of Subsidy Verification. A task force. Like they're hunting Bin Laden but the target is someone's grandmother in Ohio who maybe checked the wrong box on her application three years ago.
$2.2 billion saved. That's the number they want you to remember. Not how they identified 760,000 cases of fraud. Not the appeals process. Not the error rate on their detection algorithm, assuming they used one and didn't just throw darts at a spreadsheet. Just the savings. Which sounds impressive until you remember the government spent $2 trillion on COVID relief and couldn't account for where half of it went, but now they've got the healthcare fraud thing locked down tight.
Your tax dollars at work. Probably. Unless this was also fraud.
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