Trump Administration Removes Subsidies for 189,000 ACA Enrollees

The Trump administration announced it would remove health subsidies for 189,000 enrollees on the Affordable Care Act exchanges after finding duplicate and deceased beneficiaries. The cut is expected to save the federal government about $738 million in improper payments this year, CMS officials said during a Wednesday press conference. Officials also said they plan to remove subsidies for another 3,500 people by the end of the month.

CMS officials identified roughly 120,000 cases of overlapping Medicaid coverage, 58,000 cases of duplicate Medicare coverage, and about 11,000 cases involving deceased enrollees. Duplicate enrollees are contacted and given 30 days to respond, while the estates of deceased enrollees also have 30 days to dispute the record before subsidies and plans are canceled.

The administration has previously revoked subsidies from about 551,000 enrollees it said were enrolled in Medicaid and receiving duplicate ACA subsidies, and last month it announced it would terminate coverage for more than 760,000 people whose enrollment it deemed unauthorized. These actions are part of a broader effort to identify fraud, waste and abuse in federal programs, according to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said no one is losing health insurance coverage as a result of the latest crackdown. However, the loss of subsidies caused average premiums to rise, and some people have dropped their marketplace coverage as a result and are now uninsured, according to health policy researcher KFF.

The CMS is legally required to periodically analyze data on the ACA exchanges to root out overlapping coverage. The first Trump administration made it mandatory for exchanges to conduct data matching twice a year, and this year the agency identified the overlapping cases that led to the subsidy cuts.