Headed into the midterm election season, the Trump administration’s record on healthcare coverage was already a disaster. With congressional Republicans and the White House scrapping Affordable Care Act subsidies late last year, millions of Americans ended up losing health insurance that they could no longer afford.
There was, however, still room for the administration to make matters worse. The Washington Post reported:
Vice President JD Vance and administration officials on Tuesday announced that they are removing about 760,000 enrollees from Affordable Care Act coverage, saying that they were fraudulently enrolled in the government health program.
“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Vance said at a press conference, alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson.
A related New York Times report added, “Mr. Vance said the 750,000 who would lose coverage were a mix of people who either did not meet the eligibility requirements or did not even exist. The administration plans to do more research on an additional 440,000 people who may also fall into one of those categories.”
At face value, this might seem like a positive step in a constructive direction. Other than criminals, no one likes fraud, and if officials have uncovered credible evidence of people taking improper advantage of the ACA system, then it’s worth applauding efforts to save taxpayer money without improperly taking benefits away from Americans who deserve them.
But — and you had to know a “but” was coming — there’s some uncertainty about the reliability of the administration’s claims.
According to Oz, who also spoke at the event, the purge targeted ostensible ACA consumers who never filed a claim or filled a prescription, the idea being that real people use their health insurance, and fake enrollees do not.
It’s unclear, however, whether at least some of these people never filed a claim or filled a prescription because they’re healthy.
Complicating matters, administration officials, who don’t have an especially good track record when it comes to using artificial intelligence (and especially not on health-related matters), conceded at Tuesday’s press conference that they relied, at least in part, on an artificial intelligence model to help identify which ACA enrollees met eligibility standards.
The administration’s latest announcement, in other words, was a bold salvo, but it’s likely that this won’t be the final word on the subject.
As for the bigger picture, Brad Woodhouse, who leads the advocacy group Protect Our Care, told The Wall Street Journal, “Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick. Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that. It’s a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered but to shower billionaires with tax breaks instead.”
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