Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced Tuesday the administration will cancel at least 760,000 Obamacare enrollments, and warned the total could top one million. Oz called the group “phantoms,” citing unanswered outreach and a lack of claims as proof of “100 percent fraud.” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, joined Oz at the news conference and said the removals will save $2.2 billion.
A Democratic congressional nominee for Missouri, Fred Wellman, slammed the administration: “They are kicking people off their healthcare for being healthy. Many people are perfectly healthy…until they aren’t. This is stupid and evil.”
Oz said, “760,000 people, we call them phantoms, because we believe most of them don’t exist or had no idea they had coverage, we believe that, because we have been writing them, telexing them, you know, walking to them, FedExing them, whatever we could possibly do to get into touch with them, they won’t answer, and they have never filed a claim.”
“Why didn’t we take off the other 450,000 people?” he continued, suggesting the total removed might break one million. “They’re coming. But they had something about their story that was a little bit different than what we expected from the 100 percent fraud story.”
“So we’re giving another chance to them to be able to try to tell us that they really have a Social Security number, or they really did have the insurance.”
“Frankly, if you’ve had a claim, it gives us confidence, you at least know you have insurance,” the CMS administrator also said, adding, “we’re not interested in taking innocent people off the rolls, we’re interested in protecting them from the bad guys. $2.2 billion is the money that they were stealing from the government. It wasn’t the money that people were getting.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that “Tuesday’s enforcement action, directed by the Vance-led White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges since the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraud began last year.”
Healthcare policy and data expert Charles Gaba noted on Substack that “It’s important to note that this doesn’t clarify whether ‘removing enrollments’ means actually canceling their policies (which is a contract between the enrollee and a private insurance carrier) or if it just means canceling their federal subsidies (which would mean that the enrollees have to start paying full price, and may have subsidies from earlier this year clawed back).”
Others joined in the pushback.
Back in June, Oz claimed that 40 percent of Affordable Care Act exchange enrollees who signed up “never use the insurance.” He said, “we have a lot of fake people.”
At the time, journalist James Surowiecki responded to his remarks, writing, “This is such an extraordinarily stupid claim by Oz. There was a 15-year stretch where I had individual health insurance and never used it once. Same is true of many many men from their 20s to their 40s (and men older than that if they’re lazy about physicals and the like).”
On Tuesday, a social media account for David Dolkart, whose bio says he is a “healthcare leader with a solid background in medical practice management, information technology, electronic medical records,” wrote: “Insurance company actuaries love those healthy people who don’t file claims. Oz doesn’t understand risk pooling.”
Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick asked, “Wait, it’s now ‘fraud’ to pay for health insurance that you don’t use?”
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Not only evil blut totally stupid.