WASHINGTON — Taxpayers were paying twice for the same coverage, and the last Administration let it ride. On Wednesday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson stood at the HHS podium and showed the receipts on how the Trump Administration shut that door.
Dr. Oz laid out the scale. In 2025, the Biden Administration left a backlog of nearly 550,000 duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare enrollments, and by clearing it, the Trump Administration saved nearly $4.4 billion. “When it comes to program integrity, the Biden Administration was sleeping on the job,” Oz said in the CMS announcement. “We’ve already saved nearly $6 billion.”
The work did not stop. “In 2026, CMS identified 189,000 subsidized enrollments involving duplicate Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP coverage,” Secretary Kennedy said, including records showing the enrollee had died. CMS acted to remove the improper subsidies in all of those cases, preventing an estimated $738 million in payments this year alone, which exceeds $1.5 billion at an annualized rate. Officials stressed that no one loses coverage: people keep the one plan they actually use.
FTC Chairman Ferguson named who was cashing in. “It was a choice, a conscious choice, in the previous Administration to do nothing about this and it helped no one,” he said. “Rich insurance companies and unscrupulous brokers were the only beneficiaries of this. That is fixed today.” Every dollar saved goes back to the vulnerable Americans these programs were built to serve. Watch Rapid Response 47’s video.
