By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-09-30 23:57:14 | Updated at 2026-10-02 04:03:16
1 day ago
President Donald Trump’s White House began sending $500 refund checks on Wednesday to nearly 1 million Americans whom the administration says were “overcharged” for Obamacare insurance by the Biden administration.
The Treasury Department checks are being mailed to more than 950,000 Americans living in at least 30 states who use healthcare.gov, a federal marketplace where people sign up for Obamacare health insurance, an administration official told The Hill.
“For years, the Biden administration overcharged you to fund the operation of HealthCare.gov,” President Trump wrote in a letter being sent with the checks and obtained by the outlet. “That money belongs to hard-working Americans, not the Government, and now I’m returning it to you!”
The White House says the Biden administration specifically overcharged “user fees” that ultimately resulted in high premiums paid through the insurance website, the Daily Mail reported. The Trump administration says the fees were not used to benefit the people who paid for the higher premiums and amounted to an excess of $500 million in user fees, per the report.
“The fees have typically been used to cover services like technology support, call center operations, and outreach efforts to enroll more Americans in health insurance plans. However, the Trump administration has slashed funding for outreach efforts,” according to The Hill.
The checks are being sent only a few weeks ahead of midterm elections on Nov. 3, where affordability and healthcare costs are key issues.
“You have paid into this flawed System, and now you are finally getting something back,” Trump wrote in the letter.
The $500 payments are different from the $5,000 checks President Trump pitched as a “Trump dividend” and a “reward for people” for putting up with Biden’s poor economic policies.
Individuals who are eligible for the $500 payments have already been identified by the government, so there is no application process.
Vice President JD Vance announced last week that $2.2 billion has been recovered in Obamacare fraud.
Vance said the Biden administration relaxed eligibility for the Obamacare program but failed to verify enrollees’ eligibility, while simultaneously incentivizing brokers to enroll people in the program.
“You have a system where, on the one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system, while on the other hand, the government isn’t even checking whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program. What do you have? Of course — rampant, rampant fraud,” he said.
Vance said the Trump administration is taking multiple actions to combat Obamacare fraud, including ending enrollment for 750,000 people believed to be fraudulently enrolled.
“The second thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to do some additional verification. We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled, but we’re going to do some additional verification on about 419,000 people,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits.”
“To put into context the amount of money that we’re stopping from going to fraudsters today — $2.2 billion — the average American child receives about $4,000 in healthcare benefits every single year,” he added. “That means that we are saving 550,000 American children’s worth of healthcare that was going to fraudsters and now will go to the essential services for which it was meant to go.”
