More than one million people enrolled in Obamacare health plans have no Social Security number in the system, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz disclosed in a video released over the weekend, a figure both officials called a clear marker of widespread fraud baked into the Affordable Care Act marketplace during the Biden years.
The announcement, made through an HHS video and amplified by Kennedy on X on June 27, landed alongside a June HHS issue brief that laid out the scale of the problem. CMS flagged roughly one million broker-assisted sign-ups through HealthCare.gov that carried no Social Security number and owed no premium. Investigators labeled the enrollments suspicious rather than confirmed fraud, but the pattern, officials say, points to a system that was deliberately left wide open.
Kennedy did not hold back. As the Daily Caller reported:
"The Obamacare marketplace is plagued by fraud in large part because the Biden administration dismantled basic program integrity guardrails."
He added that "partisan lawfare blocked the common sense efforts to protect taxpayers", a reference to court challenges that stalled earlier Trump administration attempts to tighten enrollment verification.
The one-million figure is only one piece of a much larger mess. CMS has already stripped or blocked close to 2.9 million improper enrollments, and the agency believes approximately 2.6 million more remain in the system. An unnamed Trump administration official pegged the total cost of the fraud at roughly $10 billion across 2021 to 2024, though that figure has not been independently verified.
Fox News reported that HHS found improper, phantom, and fraudulent enrollment peaked at 5.6 million people in 2025. An HHS report stated: "We estimate 2.6 million improper and phantom enrollments remain, including over 1 million enrollments without a social security number."
The trajectory tells its own story. Obamacare enrollment sat at roughly 10 million when the Biden administration took office. By 2024, it had ballooned to 22 million. That near-doubling coincided with relaxed eligibility checks and income verification rules, the very "guardrails" Kennedy says were dismantled.
The Paragon Health Institute, an outside health policy group, estimated that approximately 6.2 million of the 2026 sign-ups were improper, about 27 percent of total exchange enrollment. Paragon cautioned that not every improper enrollment constitutes fraud. But when more than a quarter of the rolls are flagged, the word "irregularity" starts to feel like a euphemism.
Dr. Oz pointed to a specific mechanism: brokers and agents who signed people up through HealthCare.gov without providing basic identifying information, then collected commissions on the phantom enrollments. His language in the HHS video was blunt:
"Some of these agents refuse to follow basic rules like providing their clients social security number. That, my friends, is a huge red flag."
Oz followed that with a direct warning: "If you're a fraudster, here's our advice to you. Do not walk away from us, run. Because we are going to find you."
The New York Post reported that rogue agents allegedly enrolled unsuspecting Americans in health plans they never signed up for, using fake identities to collect fees from insurance companies. Current enrollment stands at approximately 19.2 million, down from 23.4 million in 2025, a decline that itself reflects the ongoing purge of suspect enrollments.
The scheme is not complicated. A broker signs up a person, real or fictitious, on the federal exchange. No Social Security number is required. No premium is owed. The broker collects a commission from the insurer. The taxpayer-funded subsidy flows to the plan. Nobody checks. The federal government's broader healthcare fraud crackdown has exposed similar patterns across multiple programs, and the Obamacare exchanges appear to have been among the softest targets.
The missing-SSN problem on the exchanges is not an isolated finding. The Washington Examiner reported that HHS uncovered nearly 3 million Americans improperly enrolled in multiple Medicaid programs or simultaneously in both Medicaid and subsidized Obamacare plans. Kennedy stated that HHS staff "uncovered millions of Americans who were illegally or improperly enrolled in Medicaid and ACA plans." The estimated annual cost of those overlapping enrollments alone: $14 billion.
In 2024, 1.2 million Americans per month were enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP in two or more states simultaneously. Another 1.6 million were enrolled in both Medicaid and a subsidized Obamacare plan at the same time. These are not edge cases or clerical errors at the margins. They represent a structural failure of verification, or, as the Trump administration frames it, a deliberate choice by the prior administration to look the other way.
Oz has cited these findings to justify provisions in the recently signed "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that target Medicaid and Obamacare program integrity. "This is exactly why we fought for stronger tools in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to go after this type of waste and finally put a stop to paying twice for the same person's health coverage," Oz said, as the Examiner reported.
The DOJ's own fraud crackdown has identified taxpayer programs worth over a trillion dollars as vulnerable to abuse, and the Obamacare exchanges now sit squarely in that crosshair.
At a White House press briefing earlier in June, Oz offered an even broader estimate. Newsmax reported that Oz claimed roughly 35 percent of ACA enrollees, around 6 million people, may not be legitimate. His reasoning: they have never once filed a health insurance claim.
"We believe that 35%, roughly, of the people that are using the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare exchanges, because they've never used the program once, they've never, ever filed a claim, may not be legit."
That is a staggering assertion. If even half of it holds up, the ACA marketplace was not merely leaking money, it was hemorrhaging it. CMS issued a new rule to tighten enrollment verification after an earlier attempt was blocked by a court injunction, Newsmax noted. The legal resistance to basic verification measures is exactly the "partisan lawfare" Kennedy referenced.
Oz also made the political case plainly: "But if you care about the ACA, then you want us to take the fraud out." It is a line that ought to put defenders of the status quo in an uncomfortable position. If the program's enrollment numbers were artificially inflated by millions of phantom sign-ups, then the political boasts about record Obamacare enrollment during the Biden years start to look less like a policy success and more like a bookkeeping trick.
The Trump administration's effort to freeze suspect Medicare enrollments for home health and hospice providers reflects the same principle applied to a different program: stop the bleeding first, then investigate.
Not everyone on the rolls is a phantom. KFF, a health policy group, warned that 3.8 million people could lose coverage if Congress allows enhanced ACA subsidies to lapse. That figure represents real people with real coverage, and their situation is made worse, not better, by a system so riddled with suspect enrollments that legitimate participants are crowded into the same pool as fictitious ones.
KFF attributed the record enrollment growth largely to those enhanced subsidies. The question Congress now faces is whether to extend credits for a program whose integrity has been so thoroughly compromised. The fraud cleanup and the subsidy debate are on a collision course, and the people caught in the middle are the ones who signed up honestly, provided their Social Security numbers, and actually used their coverage.
The broader pattern of welfare fraud crackdowns across multiple states and programs suggests this is not a problem confined to one exchange or one agency. It is systemic, the predictable result of years spent loosening verification requirements in the name of expanding access.
Just The News reported that both Kennedy and Oz said they are dedicating more resources than the Biden administration to rooting out fraud in healthcare programs. That is a low bar. The prior administration's approach, by the Trump team's account, was to remove the guardrails, inflate the enrollment numbers, and then cite those numbers as proof the program was working.
Several questions remain unanswered. What specific methodology did CMS use to identify the one million flagged sign-ups? What criminal referrals, if any, have been made against the brokers and agents who allegedly gamed the system? And what accountability, if any, will attach to the officials who loosened the rules in the first place?
Kennedy's social media post on June 27 stated that the Trump administration is "taking decisive action to stop these corrupt schemes, recover taxpayer dollars." The post was truncated, but the message was clear enough. The cleanup is underway. The question is whether anyone who built the mess will ever answer for it.
When a million people can enroll in a federal health program without so much as a Social Security number, the problem is not a glitch. It is a policy choice, and the taxpayers who funded it deserve to know exactly who made it.