Remember back when Democrats swore up and down that ObamaCare was going to solve all our health care problems? That prices were going to fall and we could all keep our doctors? Those were lies meant to let them cartelize medicine and generate record profits for Big Medicine. One effect: A huge jump in fraud.
Taxpayers spent $65 billion on health insurance premiums for people who either didn’t exist or didn’t qualify for benefits in two federal programs in 2024, according to an Aug. 26 report from Paragon Health Institute.
Expanded Medicaid and Obamacare, the signature programs of the Affordable Care Act, improperly enrolled a combined 14.3 million people that year, researchers concluded.
Expanded Medicaid allows states to enroll people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, versus up to 100 percent for traditional Medicaid. That limit was about $35,600 for a family of three in 2024.
Obamacare was open to people earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level at that time, about $103,000 for a family of three.
Both programs are administered through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace, with coverage provided by commercial insurance companies.
As Lawrence Wilson details below, via The Epoch Times, researchers estimate that about 34 percent of all Marketplace enrollees in 2024 were either fraudulent, duplicates, or simply didn’t meet the benefit criteria.
And the number went up the next year, researchers said.
“Improper exchange enrollment increased by more than 26 percent from 2024 to 2025 – up to an estimated 6.5 million enrollees,” the report stated.
Researchers studied federal data from surveys, program enrollment, and spending and concluded that more than 9 million Medicaid expansion enrollees in 2024 probably didn’t qualify for the benefit.
Those were likely people whose income was over the limit, did not meet citizenship, immigration, or residency requirements, or should have been enrolled in traditional Medicaid.
It seems that getting illegal aliens on every possible welfare state program has been a driving goal of the Democrat Party for quite some time now. From Somali Lering Centers to fake hospices, it seems like an awful lot of the modern welfare state was designed to be defrauded, with significant amounts of that fraud ending up in Democrat pockets.
And then California passes the Stop Nick Shirley Act, and you realize that welfare state fraud isn’t baked in, it was designed in to transfer money from taxpayers to leftist grandees and NGOs.
The fraud wasn’t a side effect, it was the entire point of creating the program.