Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that more than 1 million people enrolled in Affordable Care Act health plans have no Social Security numbers on file, a figure he and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Dr. Mehmet Oz are calling a glaring sign of systemic fraud that flourished under the previous administration.
Kennedy made the disclosure in a video posted to X alongside Dr. Oz, as Just the News reported. Both officials said they are now dedicating more resources than the Biden administration did to rooting out fraud in federal healthcare programs, and protecting the taxpayers who fund them.
The question that hangs over the revelation is straightforward: How does the federal government hand out subsidized health coverage to a million people whose identities it cannot verify? And how long did the previous administration let it happen?
The 1 million figure is not an isolated data point. It sits inside a far larger fraud picture that the Trump administration's HHS has been assembling for months. A department report, detailed by Fox News, estimates that improper, phantom, and outright fraudulent Obamacare enrollments peaked at 5.6 million people in 2025. The cost to taxpayers: roughly $10 billion per year between 2021 and 2024.
That HHS report stated plainly:
"By our estimate, improper, phantom, and fraudulent enrollment peaked at 5.6 million people in 2025. We estimate 2.6 million improper and phantom enrollments remain, including over 1 million enrollments without a social security number."
The administration has already removed nearly 3 million fraudulent enrollees from the rolls. Another 2.6 million remain, and the enrollees without Social Security numbers represent the hardest core of that residual problem, people the government literally cannot confirm exist.
The numbers tell a story of their own. Obamacare enrollment stood at roughly 10 million when the Biden administration took office. By 2024, it had surged to 22 million. That kind of growth drew celebration from progressive health policy advocates, who treated rising enrollment as proof the law was finally working as intended.
But the growth was fueled, at least in significant part, by relaxed eligibility checks, loosened income verification rules, and expanded enrollment windows, all policy choices made by the Biden-era HHS. The Trump administration now argues those decisions didn't just open the door to more coverage. They opened the door to exploitation.
Kennedy did not hold back. In remarks reported by the New York Post, the HHS secretary said:
"The Obamacare marketplace is plagued by fraud in large part because the Biden administration dismantled basic program integrity guardrails, while partisan lawfare blocked common sense efforts to protect taxpayers."
Kennedy also posed a blunt question that taxpayers deserve an answer to:
"Why are we paying people we don't know if they actually exist?"
It is a fair question. A Social Security number is the most basic identifier the federal government uses to verify that a person is who they claim to be. Enrolling someone without one is not a minor paperwork lapse. It is a fundamental breakdown in program integrity.
Kennedy and Dr. Oz described a scheme in which "rogue agents and bad actors" enrolled unsuspecting Americans in health plans they never signed up for, collecting fees by using fake identities. The HHS report itself drew a sharp line between legitimate enrollment and what had been happening under the prior administration's watch.
"The federal government paying brokers to enroll individuals without their knowledge is not."
That partial sentence from the report, as cited by Fox News, was contrasting lawful enrollment practices with the broker-driven fraud that had been allowed to metastasize. The implication is clear: the system wasn't just failing to catch cheats. It was actively paying them.
Current enrollment in Obamacare exchange plans stands at roughly 19.2 million, down from 23.4 million in 2025. That decline reflects the ongoing purge of improper enrollments, a cleanup effort that the Trump administration has made a visible priority, even as critics accuse it of undermining coverage.
The administration's broader push to restore accountability in federal programs extends well beyond healthcare. The White House has also moved to restore the Presidential Fitness Test, replacing a program from the Obama era, another signal that this administration is willing to revisit inherited policies and reverse what it views as institutional drift.
Kennedy's announcement raises important questions that neither the video nor the available reporting fully resolves. The methodology behind the 1 million figure, whether it came from a formal audit, a CMS data pull, an inspector general review, or some other internal process, has not been publicly detailed.
Nor is it clear what "enrolled without a Social Security number" means in precise operational terms. Were these enrollees who never provided a number at all? Who submitted invalid numbers that were never checked? Or who bypassed verification steps that should have flagged them?
The distinction matters. If the system was designed to require Social Security numbers and those checks were deliberately loosened, that points to a policy failure at the top of the Biden-era HHS. If the system was never built to catch the problem in the first place, it suggests a structural flaw that predates any single administration, though the explosive growth in enrollment under Biden would have made it far worse.
There is also no public accounting yet of what happens next for the 1 million enrollees in question. Have they been disenrolled? Referred for investigation? Flagged for identity verification? Kennedy and Oz said they are dedicating resources to the problem, but no specific enforcement mechanism, executive order, or regulatory action has been named.
These gaps do not undermine the core finding. They do, however, underscore how much work remains, and how much the public still doesn't know about the scale of fraud that was allowed to accumulate.
The political dimension here is impossible to ignore. The Biden administration treated soaring Obamacare enrollment as a talking point and a legacy achievement. Every new enrollee was cited as evidence that the ACA was delivering on its promise. The possibility that millions of those enrollees were fraudulent, phantom, or improperly verified was either not examined or not disclosed.
That is a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched how Washington operates. Announce the big number. Take the credit. Move on before anyone checks the receipts.
Kennedy and Oz are now checking the receipts. Whether one agrees with every aspect of their approach, the basic principle, that the government should know who it is spending taxpayer money on, ought to be uncontroversial. The fact that it has become a partisan flashpoint says more about the state of the opposition than about the policy itself.
The broader dynamic mirrors what has played out across other fronts, where even some Democrats have broken with their party over questions of accountability and common sense governance. When the facts are plain enough, the old partisan lines don't always hold.
At its core, this is a story about a government that spent billions of dollars on people it could not identify, using a system it chose not to police, and then claimed the results as a success. The Biden administration's decision to relax verification safeguards may have been motivated by a genuine desire to expand coverage. But good intentions do not excuse $10 billion a year in fraud, or a million enrollees with no Social Security numbers.
Kennedy's disclosure is a start. The cleanup is underway. But the full scope of what happened, who profited, and who looked the other way remains to be documented.
When the government can't even confirm whether a million people on its rolls are real, the problem isn't a glitch. It's a choice someone made, and taxpayers are the ones who paid for it.
