More than one million people enrolled in Obamacare marketplace plans have no Social Security number on file, a disclosure HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called a "glaring warning sign for fraud" in a video released over the weekend alongside CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The announcement, made through an HHS video and amplified by Kennedy on X, puts fresh numbers behind what the Trump administration says is a years-long breakdown in program integrity at the federal health insurance exchange. CMS flagged roughly one million broker-assisted sign-ups through HealthCare.gov that carried no Social Security number and owed no premium, the Daily Caller reported. Investigators labeled those enrollments suspicious rather than confirmed fraud, but the sheer scale demands answers.

Kennedy laid the blame squarely on his predecessor's watch.

"The Obamacare marketplace is plagued by fraud in large part because the Biden administration dismantled basic program integrity guardrails."

He added that "a partisan lawfare blocked the common sense efforts to protect taxpayers," though he did not specify which legal actions he meant.

The numbers behind the crackdown

CMS has already stripped or blocked close to 2.9 million improper enrollments, and the agency believes roughly 2.6 million more remain. An unnamed Trump administration official told Fox News that the fraud totaled approximately $10 billion across 2021 through 2024, a figure that carries no independent verification.

That Fox News report noted that ACA enrollments spiked from 10 million at the start of the Biden term to a peak of 22 million in 2024. An HHS report cited in that coverage stated that "improper, phantom, and fraudulent enrollment peaked at 5.6 million people in 2025." The same report described preserving the fiscal integrity of the ACA exchanges as "key to safeguarding taxpayer-funded resources for those that truly need them."

The Paragon Health Institute, a health policy research group, estimated approximately 6.2 million improper 2026 sign-ups, near 27 percent of total exchange enrollment. Paragon cautioned that not every improper case amounts to fraud. But even a fraction of 6.2 million represents a staggering misuse of taxpayer money.

The Trump administration's broader effort to root out Obamacare fraud has been building for months, and the latest disclosure adds the most specific data point yet: enrollees with no Social Security number at all.

How the scheme allegedly worked

Dr. Oz pointed to brokers as the central problem. Agents allegedly enrolled people in marketplace plans without proper verification, in some cases, without the enrollees' knowledge, and then collected commissions from insurance companies. The scheme thrived, the administration argues, because the Biden-era CMS relaxed eligibility and verification requirements.

Oz did not hold back in the HHS video:

"Some of these agents refuse to follow basic rules like providing their clients social security number. That, my friends, is a huge red flag."

He followed with a direct warning to those gaming the system:

"If you're a fraudster, here's our advice to you. Do not walk away from us, run. Because we are going to find you."

The New York Post reported that Kennedy and Oz alleged rogue agents enrolled unsuspecting Americans in health plans and used fake identities to collect fees from insurance companies. That same report placed current Obamacare exchange enrollment at roughly 19.2 million, down from 23.4 million in 2025, a decline that tracks with the millions of enrollments CMS has already purged.

The drop itself tells a story. When you remove nearly three million enrollments and enrollment falls by more than four million year over year, the gap between real coverage and phantom sign-ups starts to come into focus.

A pattern the Biden administration left behind

Kennedy posted on X on June 27, writing that he and Oz were "exposing how bad actors exploited the Obamacare marketplace by enrolling people without proper verification and profiting at taxpayers' expense." He said the Trump administration was "taking decisive action to stop these corrupt schemes, recover taxpayer dollars."

The June HHS issue brief, published by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, provided the underlying data. CMS flagged the roughly one million broker-assisted sign-ups with no SSN and no premium owed. That combination, no identity verification and zero cost to the enrollee, is exactly the kind of loophole that invites abuse.

Earlier disclosures from Dr. Oz had already flagged that as much as 35 percent of Obamacare enrollments might be fraudulent, citing millions of phantom sign-ups. The latest numbers reinforce that estimate rather than contradict it.

The question that hangs over all of this is straightforward: How did the prior administration allow more than a million people to enroll in a taxpayer-subsidized health insurance program without providing a Social Security number? The Biden-era CMS never publicly explained what "guardrails" it removed or why. Kennedy's claim that those guardrails were dismantled remains an official assertion without specific policy citations in the public record so far.

But the results speak plainly enough. A system that does not require basic identity verification is a system that invites fraud. And a system that pays brokers commissions for each enrollment, with no penalty for enrolling phantoms, is a system designed to be exploited.

What's at stake

KFF, a health policy research group, has warned that 3.8 million people could lose coverage if Congress lets enhanced Obamacare subsidies lapse. That figure adds political pressure to the fraud debate. Defenders of the ACA will argue that cracking down too hard risks stripping coverage from legitimate enrollees. The administration's counter is that cleaning the rolls protects the program for people who actually need it.

Both arguments can be true at the same time. But only one side is asking why a million enrollees have no Social Security number.

Just The News reported that Kennedy and Oz said they are dedicating more resources than the Biden administration to rooting out healthcare fraud. Whether that commitment produces criminal referrals, recovered funds, or systemic reforms remains to be seen. No specific charges, arrests, or enforcement actions against brokers have been announced.

The federal government's track record on prosecuting large-scale fraud is uneven at best. The Feeding Our Future case, in which a fugitive was captured in Somalia after four years on the run from $250 million in fraud charges, showed both the scale of federal program abuse and the difficulty of holding people accountable after the money has moved.

The open questions here are significant. What methodology did CMS use to flag the one million suspicious enrollments? How does the agency define "improper enrollment" versus confirmed fraud? What specific verification requirements did the Biden administration relax, and when? What legal or enforcement actions will follow the disclosure? And does the one-million-no-SSN figure overlap with, or sit on top of, the broader 2.9 million improper enrollments already removed?

These are questions that congressional oversight committees should be pressing hard. The administration has put the numbers on the table. Now it needs to show the receipts, and the consequences for the people who gamed the system.

The real cost of looking the other way

The Obama-era health law was sold as a way to extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. Barack Obama's legacy projects have a way of generating impressive headline numbers while leaving uncomfortable questions about where the money actually went. The ACA marketplace is no exception.

If even half of the Trump administration's fraud estimates hold up under scrutiny, taxpayers subsidized billions of dollars in coverage for people who either didn't exist, didn't know they were enrolled, or couldn't provide the most basic proof of identity. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a failure of stewardship.

Enhanced subsidies, relaxed verification, and a broker commission structure with no meaningful oversight created a perfect environment for abuse. The Biden administration either didn't see it or didn't care to look. The Trump administration is now cataloging the wreckage.

A health insurance program that cannot verify whether its enrollees are real people is not a safety net. It is an open register.