A Million Obamacare Enrollees With No Social Security Number — And a Marketplace CMS Calls “Plagued By Fraud.”

On June 27, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services released a video featuring HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Trump administration) and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz (Trump appointee) with a single, striking claim: more than 1 million people were enrolled in Affordable Care Act marketplace plans without a listed Social Security number. The Daily Caller reported it the next morning under a blunt headline — the Obamacare marketplace, the officials said, is “plagued by fraud.”

The agency’s framing is pointed: CMS says it flagged roughly a million broker-assisted sign-ups through HealthCare.gov that carried no Social Security number and owed no premium — the profile of an account that may have been created by someone other than the person whose name is on it. Kennedy tied the problem directly to his predecessors, saying the marketplace is exposed “in large part because the Biden administration dismantled basic program integrity guardrails.”

This page separates what is documented from what is asserted. The 1-million figure, the broker schemes, the federal watchdog findings, and the dollars at stake are real and sourced. But “improper payment” is an accounting term, not a criminal verdict — and a missing Social Security number is a red flag, not proof of a crime. Both things are true at once, and we lay out each.

• 1M+ — ACA marketplace enrollees CMS says had no listed Social Security number and owed no premium — flagged as suspicious, not confirmed fraud · Source: Daily Caller; HHS
• 5.6 million — the level at which CMS estimates improper, phantom, and fraudulent enrollment peaked in 2025 — nearly half of all enrollment growth since the subsidy expansion · Source: Fox News; CMS
• ~2.9 million — improper enrollments CMS says it has stripped or blocked, with roughly 2.6 million more estimated to remain · Source: Fox News
• $10 billion — a Trump-administration estimate of fraud across 2021–2024; the agency itself notes the figure is an estimate, not an audited total · Source: Fox News
• $21 billion — unreconciled advance premium tax credits for 2023 alone, per GAO — subsidies paid out that were never squared against enrollees' actual income · Source: GAO-26-108742
• ~$12 billion — projected 2026 taxpayer savings CMS attributes to its Marketplace Integrity rule cracking down on improper subsidized enrollments · Source: CMS final rule; Federal Register

The message came not from a press release but from a short video the agency posted to social media on June 27, 2026. In it, Kennedy and Oz framed the Affordable Care Act marketplace as a program that had been allowed to run with the locks off. The headline number — more than a million enrollees with no Social Security number on file — was offered as the clearest single signal that something had gone wrong with how people were being put on the rolls.

Dr. Oz described the mechanism in plain terms: “Shady insurance agents and other bad actors have been getting paid to enroll unsuspecting Americans in health plans they never signed up for.” According to the agency, those agents filed applications for people who did not ask for coverage, in some cases using stolen identities, and collected commissions for each sign-up. CMS says it identified enrollees who have never used their ACA coverage and never filed a single claim — accounts that look less like patients and more like line items.

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The fraud pattern CMS describes is not new, and it does not require the enrollee’s knowledge. After Congress temporarily enhanced the ACA’s advance premium tax credits, a large share of low-income applicants could be placed in “zero-dollar” plans — coverage fully paid by the subsidy, with no monthly premium owed. For a dishonest broker, that combination is the perfect target: a person can be signed up, or switched between plans, and never see a bill that would tip them off.

The independent health-policy group KFF documented the scale before this week’s announcement. Between January and August 2024, CMS received 183,553 complaints of unauthorized enrollment and another 90,863 complaints of unauthorized plan switching on HealthCare.gov. In response, the agency suspended roughly 850 brokers for suspected fraudulent or abusive conduct over a five-month stretch. The schemes often started with social-media ads promising cash rewards, funneling personal information to agents who then enrolled people for the commissions.

A missing Social Security number sits at the center of the agency’s concern because it short-circuits the basic check the system is supposed to run: matching an applicant to a real, verified identity. CMS cautions that the million flagged accounts are suspicious, not adjudicated fraud. It is worth noting the other side of that coin too — some lawfully present immigrants can be eligible for marketplace coverage without an SSN, so a blank field is a reason to investigate, not an automatic conviction.

The administration’s top-line figures come in tiers. CMS says improper, phantom, and fraudulent enrollment peaked at about 5.6 million people in 2025 — which it characterizes as nearly half of all enrollment growth since the enhanced subsidies took effect. The agency says it has since stripped or blocked roughly 2.9 million of those enrollments and estimates about 2.6 million remain on the rolls, the slice that includes the million-plus accounts with no Social Security number.

On dollars, a Trump-administration official pegged the cost at roughly $10 billion across 2021 through 2024. That number deserves a careful label: it is the administration’s estimate, not an audited or independently verified total, and reporting that carried it noted as much. The precise, document-backed figures come from the watchdogs — and they are large enough that the political ones do not need inflating.

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The most rigorous numbers here are not the agency’s talking points but the Government Accountability Office’s. In a December 3, 2025 report (GAO-26-108742), investigators found that the federal Marketplace approved subsidized coverage for nearly all of GAO’s fictitious test applicants — and that fraud risks in the advance premium tax credit “persist.” GAO counted over 29,000 Social Security numbers used for multiple subsidized enrollments in a single 2023 plan year, and nearly 68,000 in 2024. It flagged at least 160,000 applications in 2024 bearing evidence of unauthorized agent or broker changes.

The dollar exposure is the headline GAO finding: more than $21 billion in unreconciled advance premium tax credits for 2023 — subsidies paid out and never squared against enrollees’ actual income. For context, CMS distributed nearly $124 billion in marketplace subsidies to about 19.5 million enrollees in plan year 2024. GAO also noted a telling gap: CMS had not updated its formal fraud-risk assessment since 2018, even as the program doubled in size. The HHS Inspector General had separately found CMS authorized hundreds of millions in tax credits for enrollees who never paid their required premiums.

CMS’s policy response is the 2025 Marketplace Integrity and Affordability rule, finalized June 20, 2025 and published in the Federal Register days later. The agency estimated that as many as 6.2 million of 2026 sign-ups — about 27% of open-enrollment volume — were improper, potentially driving up to $25 billion in improper subsidy spending. By tightening income verification, ending certain year-round special enrollment periods, and reinstating a requirement that subsidized enrollees actually file and reconcile their taxes, CMS projected roughly $12 billion in 2026 taxpayer savings.

The numbers do not float free of politics, and the administration is explicit about whom it blames. Enrollment in the ACA marketplaces roughly doubled — from about 10 million to a peak near 22 million — after President Joe Biden (D) and a Democratic Congress enhanced the premium tax credits, first in the 2021 pandemic relief law and then extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those richer subsidies created the zero-premium plans that brokers learned to exploit.

CMS argues the Biden administration paired that growth with looser controls — relaxed eligibility checks, reduced income verification, and expanded year-round enrollment — that widened the opening. HHS now points to a roughly 13% enrollment drop, from 22.1 million in 2025 to about 19.2 million in 2026, as evidence the crackdown is removing accounts that should never have been there. Critics counter that tighter rules can also push out legitimate enrollees, a tension the next section takes up directly.

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“Thirty-five percent, roughly, of the people using the Obamacare exchanges — because they never used the program, never filed a claim — may not be legit.”

Dr. Mehmet Oz, CMS Administrator, to NBC News

Independent experts are not uniformly persuaded by the largest claims. Health-policy analysts who spoke to NBC News and CNBC said fraud is real and present in the marketplace, but that the administration’s biggest numbers — especially Oz’s suggestion that 35% of exchange users may be illegitimate — are likely overstated, since “never filed a claim” describes plenty of healthy people who simply did not get sick. And a federal judge in June 2026 struck down some provisions of the Marketplace Integrity rule, a reminder that the policy response is itself contested in court.

Strip away the rhetoric on both sides and a durable core remains. The GAO documented fraud risks that persist, tens of thousands of duplicated Social Security numbers, and more than $21 billion in unreconciled subsidies for a single year. The HHS Inspector General found tax credits paid for people who never paid premiums. CMS suspended hundreds of brokers and fielded six figures of unauthorized-enrollment complaints. The million accounts with no Social Security number are, at minimum, a verification failure worth running to ground — whether or not every one turns out to be a crime.

That is the honest frame for a DOGE-style accountability story: the documented waste is large, the criminal share is still being established, and the responsible move is to fix the controls and follow the evidence — not to round every flagged account up into a headline. We will track the litigation over the integrity rule, the next GAO and OIG figures, and whether the recoveries the administration promises actually materialize.

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