Remarks: JD Vance Holds a News Conference on Medical Fraud in Washington - September 22, 2026

Good morning, everybody. Have a seat. Thanks for being here. So we have a, an announcement that we're very excited about, which is that we are in our Fraud Task Force led by the amazing Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Oz on the medical side, but also of course by Andrew Ferguson, my partner in crime with the Fraud Task Force.

We are announcing $2.2 billion in American taxpayer money that we're saving by doing this amazing common sense and what should have been an obvious thing, we're actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren't doing that before.

Now, there's something that the Biden administration did, which is on the one hand, they would provide incentives for brokers to enroll people into the Obamacare system, while at the same exact time they were relaxing eligibility for that program and they weren't even checking the relaxed eligibility that they imposed.

So what do you have? 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. There are a few actions that I want to focus on today that I'm particularly excited about.

The first is that we are stopping Obamacare enrollment for about 750,000 people, 750,000 people who we believe are fraudulently enrolled in the program. That's number one. 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 en- -- enrolled, but we're going to do some additional verification on about 419,000 people.

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.

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. This is what the Fraud Task Force is all about. On the one hand, saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important, that ensure that low income kids can see a doctor, that ensure that our elderly Americans get the healthcare that they need, these programs, they are deserving, they're important, but they're not going to exist unless we stop the fraud.

So I want to do two final notes of just appreciation here, and then I want to highlight what this looks like. So first of all, the President of the United States has empowered us with a whole of government approach to go after the fraud. You cannot do this. And so many times, Andrew Ferguson is come into my office or Dr. Oz has come into my office and we've said we need to do something in order to enable the work of the Fraud Task Force, but you, you require the coordination of four or five different agencies who aren't even communicating with each other.

We go to the President of the United States and we say, "Sir, we need to do this." And he says, "Do it. Go and get it done." That coordination, that whole of government approach that's been, that's empowered, uh, by the President of the United States, that is why the Fraud Task Force has been so successful.

So I want to thank the president. The second group of people I want to thank is the incredible team that Dr. Oz has. A few of them are going to speak today, of course, Killer Kim in an amazing red dress here. Uh, Kim has found probably more fraud in the federal government than maybe any person in the entire Trump administration.

She's doing an amazing job. We've got, of course, our amazing, uh, nominee for deputy secretary of HNHS. These people have done an amazing job. They are dedicated public servants. They care about this work. They like saving money, but I think more importantly, they like ensuring that these essential programs are there for the American people.

That's why we're doing this and that's why we're so proud of this work. I want to highlight just, just on a final note before I kick it over to Dr. Oz, what does this look like? What this looks like is in one case, we found a fraud ring that had 40 agents, 40 brokerage agents who had funneled 50,000 people into the Obamacare system fraudulently.

Now, some of those people were probably legitimate. Most of those people were not eligible, either they didn't meet the citizenship or the income requirements. Many of those people quite literally didn't even exist. We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers, that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have healthcare.

This was a scandal. And thanks to the work of Dr. Oz, Andy Ferguson, Secretary Kennedy, and of course the leadership of the president, this is stopping. I wanna turn it over to Dr. Oz to talk more about this. Uh, he'll turn it over to a couple of our colleagues, and then we'll take a few questions about this program.

But guys, great job. Very proud to work with you.

Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. So fraud is not just about stealing our money. Fraud is actually even more so stealing our health, stealing our lives, and maybe most importantly, fraud steals our trust. These systems are spectacular. They were built in an era, uh, where we had a high trust society. And programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the Obamacare programs will not work in a low trust society.

So what the vice president spoke to, and what the president has empowered us to do is vitally important to the future of this nation. Uh, the all of government approach works, because you use all of government. And there are people in this, uh, room, obviously Secretary Kennedy, um, who has been incredibly inspirational in this effort at the entire agency.

Peter Nelson, you'll meet in a second, Jack Holleran, Mike Stern, Janine, Tim, Bill, Larry, Jan, there are so many, I can go on and on. Every one of the names I mentioned has been helping in recovering billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer dollars. They could be in the private sector, they came to serve this president, this vice president, this administration, because they have the same passion we have to make sure that the money goes to people who need it. And we're gonna protect those individuals from the fraudsters you're gonna hear about in a second.

Let's talk about the ACA, the Obamacare system. It was created as a bridge. You took people who are on Medicaid, living in poverty. As they move into prosperity, there needed to be a mechanism so to help them get there. And the Obamacare concept was that you give them some private insurance, but the government pays most of it. And eventually they move into prosperity to private sector, commercial insurance, the kinds of things that all the folks in the press pool already have as part of their contracts.

But the government who has just funded all these efforts ha- -- has unfortunately run into a, a problem, because the Obamacare program, the law was pasted together with rules that are difficult to enforce. I'm saying that as the person responsible for this agency. It is hard to enforce an organization crafted so that law enforcement itself struggles to find out whether or not they can keep up with these massive fraud schemes.

So guess where the grifters, the drifters, the people who are bad apples run during events like COVID? They run to where the money is, it turned out to be a safer way to make money than is dealing drugs or, or whatever scams they were involved in. For years, to give you a number to anchor on, for years, the ACA, Obamacare, had 10 million enrollees from 2015 to 2020. During COVID, it went up to 22 million people.

Mr. Vice President, there is no way we are needing to pay more than twice as much for people to be in a program when it was stable at 10 million. So the question it becomes, what happened? Well, the guardrails were weakened and the prior administration decided not to enforce the weakened guardrails. So a- --about 35% of current people on the Obamacare system, 35%, more than a third, have never used the program.

They haven't bought a prescription medication, they haven't seen a doctor. That's just not possible. That's at least twice as much as your normal incidents of people having insurance and not using it. So we know there is fraud. The question is, where is it? And when you start going after this, you get t- --into a place that is a, a little bit painful.

And the concrete example that we wanna provide today, uh, that the vice president hinted at, is that normally 1%, a single digit, 1% of people who get Obamacare exchange plans do not have a social security number. Why? Because we're supposed to check their tax returns to make sure they're making between one and four times the poverty level so they're eligible for all of our taxpayers to pay their insurance so they get the discount.

Now, if 100% of people coming on the program don't have social security numbers, I think we'd all agree there's a problem. Well, that happened this year. 1.1 million people came onto the Obamacare programs with no social security numbers, no ID numbers to allow us to figure out they've been legally here, and they're getting full freight insurance paid by you, the U.S. taxpayer.

So we went after them. I'm gonna give you an example, because I want you to understand what this looks like in practice. It's Peter Nelson who runs the CCIIO, uh, Obamacare system could come out here, because this disturbing problem is best illustrated by the kinds of fraudsters we're talking about. So Kim, this gentleman, Cory, he's, uh, got a very punchable face, I think.

Crooked, f- -- every crooked fraudster, by the way, is crooked in their own way. So let me tell you about this fella. Cory Lloyd has a partner, Steven Strong. They targeted tens of thousands of Americans in a $233 million scheme based on what I just said, selling Obamacare policies to people who didn't know they had them, didn't want them, or phantoms.

They're not real people. Do not think these are real human beings getting policies. These are fake names and numbers, because there's no numbers, and they're getting policy money from the U.S. government. These crooks bribed homeless and jobless people into enrolling in the ACA plans. They had no i- -- idea what they were doing.

They didn't qualify them. It violated federal, uh, income and eligibility verifications, and then they bragged about the money they made and they belittled the people they victimized. They used it to purchase the kinds of things that many of you might like to have. This is a beautiful estate in the Keys in Florida, where this group is based.

It's quite nice. It's got, you notice the, the, the boats. Uh, it's a, you know, massive property. I can tell you their, the real estate's pretty expensive down there. They had also luxury vehicles, ocean front, and the Keys is enough to get you hopefully a little bit frustrated. But let me take it one level deeper.

Their victims lost access to life-saving treatments like substance use disorder support, mental health disorders, serious infectious disease like HIV, because they were able to afford this kind of property. And I want you to take a look at what happened when the Florida s- -- uh, co- -- coast was hit by a hurricane.

They quickly realized they could go to shelters and recruit and victimize people at their worst moment in life. They're in a shelter, their home is blown away, they got out of the trailer park or wherever they were trying to escape, because it's flooded. And this is the text message, this is, I can't even say these words on television, but the, Lloyd said, "It's a killer idea to sign up these poor individuals, make them victims.

If it could, if it could pull it off, I wanna rape the shelters." And then Strong said, "Ha, ha, I'm not kidding." And then Lloyd said, "Me either. Let's F 'em up." These are the kinds of people we're talking about. So when we hear feedback that, uh, maybe some of these folks are okay. There's a lot more of this, and the people are okay.

Thank you, Kim. We're seeing multinational criminal syndicates involved in this process. Small-time hoodlums are getting involved. It's a open, uh, secret. You can come into the federal government and use us as a piggy bank, so folks are coming here. So here are the actions we're taking today, and they're aggressive and they are bold and they're just what the vice president ordered and what the task force desires.

Now he's gonna thank the members of the task force, because without them this would not be possible. First, we are preventing fraudulent and improper enrollments upfront. CMS is announcing a temporary national moratorium. It has never been done before. There will be no new brokers for Obamacare in this country for the next six months.

And we do not feel at all con- -- conf- -- uh, uh, conflicted about that decision, because most of the fraud, disproportionate amount of the fraud is taking place from these individuals. So if you have an active exchange agreement, you can keep in the system for now. We'll see about you. But the folks who are thinking of coming on down and taking advantage, they're not coming in. This is gonna address a concerning trend, um, especially this Social Security issue.

Second, we are removing existing unauthorized enrollments from the system and holding brokers accountable. So we have found these policies to be wanting. We have gone to the insurance industry and say, "We want these people off the program." They've taken 760,000 of these phantom accounts. These are not real people.

We're not paying insurance for non-existent ghosts. And so we have collected that money back. It's worth 2.2 billion. And Mr. uh, Mr. Vice President, I pledge to you we will be more than there, way more than there, because there's a lot more fraud. Now that we know with the tip of the iceberg is we can find the bigger icicles down below.

And third, we are enforcing CMS regulations that are governing agents and brokers. We are looking at you. We're watching you. This is the Hawthorne effect in practice. As we watch you, you know we're at, we're looking. And if you do things that are wrong, we're gonna come after you. We will enforce the law.

All applications involving an agent and a broker have to include a Social Security number, and we want existing agents to use login.gov or ID me, which means when you go to the airport, we know who you are. We want that same system to make sure you are cleared to be able to sell insurance to Americans who might be vulnerable, like in a hurricane shelter.

These efforts extend way beyond the AC Obamacare plan. One big me- -- the message I'm gonna deliver today is that these rats will flee the sinking ship of fraud. They take advantage of another program. And Chris Klomp has that story. Thank you.

Mr. Vice President, Administrator Oz, thank you for your leadership on this. Uh, there's an incredibly real human toll from fraud, and we've experienced this, uh, in this capacity firsthand. Uh, I wanna spend today talking a little bit about that. I want us to talk about what we're learning, what the team is learning from all these actions in this fight against this kind of fraud, because it turns out fraud is not an accounted abstraction.

It affects real people every day and there is an incredibly real human cost. A health insurance enrollment ought to mean three very simple things: A real person, a real choice, a verifiable enrollment. Very simple. But instead, a dishonest broker comes along and can turn your identity into somebody else's payday.

And we've learned something. Fraud doesn't stand still. We can't just hunt for it in the same places and expect that isn't going to move around. I want to give you an example of this. Look at durable medical equipment. You know, these are, uh, the equipment supplies that you might need at home, oxygen respirators, uh, uh, uh, you know, other supplies.

Uh, Mr. Vice President, last February, uh, uh, the day after the State of the Union, you announced a nationwide moratorium on, uh, all new durable medical equipment suppliers, not dissimilar from the moratorium that's being announced on brokers today. Um, this was built. This affected all suppliers who were serving original Medicare.

And the results were significant. We've announced it before. A billion and a half dollars of sus- -- uh, suspected fraudulent payments were saved last year. That was a win. We drained the swamp. We declared victory, right? Well, obviously not. So thanks to Kim, thanks to the team, thanks to Advanced Analytics we learned that those fraudsters didn't stand still.

So we followed them. Suppliers who had already been revoked from original Medicare did the next logical thing to them, they moved to the insurers, they moved to Medicare Advantage. And they didn't just go bill another billion and a half dollars. This time they billed nearly three and a half billion dollars.

They just shifted. So we followed them. And earlier this month, as we've announced, we barred them. The lesson is simple, fraud adapts, so must we. So we can't fight modern fraud by playing whack-a-mole, closing one scheme, waiting to see where it's gonna show up next. We're learning how to fight these networks.

We're learning the schemes, we're learning the system adaptations, we're connecting dots, we're looking at patterns. We're asking where fraud may move so that we can close vulnerabilities ahead of time. And we're not just closing the last loophole. We're building a system with the next move in mind. And that's the approach that we're bringing to the marketplace today.

Because ultimately, all of this, as I said, has a very human purpose. Your identity should belong to you. Your healthcare should be a function of your choice. It's your health. Honest brokers should not have to compete with dishonest brokers. Consumers should not have to wonder if they can trust the coverage that they have in their name.

Taxpayers should not wonder if their proceeds are going to legitimate enrollments. And fraudsters, you should understand something too, we're not just looking at where fraud's happening today. We're looking where you're headed tomorrow and we'll be there. We're not just adapting to the current scheme, we're changing the system.

And with that, Chairman Ferguson, I'll turn it to you.

Uh, thank you, Chris. I wanna highlight something that Chris said. I've done a lot of these press conferences with more than a half dozen agencies, and we always talk about the big numbers, and we should because they're important, but every act of fraud wounds real Americans, not just financially, in physical ways, two ways.

One, we've done, uh, fraud work with HHS that involved people performing skin substitute surgeries on people who didn't need the surgeries, physically maiming elderly American citizens so that they could collect from all of us for having done it. The -- we had programs fraudulently handing out CDLs to illegal immigrants and other people who weren't qualified for it, who then drove their 40 ton weapons down the road, decapitating and killing American citizens.

Thanks to President Trump and Vice President Vance, this is not just an abstraction. We are going after this fraud because it hurts real people in the real world every day. It also denies people access to their programs. Every single time someone cheats and gets SNAP benefits they're not entitled to, some mother and her family who are entitled to those SNAP benefits that all of us are paying for doesn't get them and fraud makes people go hungry.

It maims, it hurts, it impoverishes, it wounds, and it's the most vulnerable among us that suffer. That's why this is important. This isn't just about protecting the fisk, although that's important. This is about protecting our fellow citizens from the predation of the worst people. Second, we heard Dr. Oz talk about social trust, yes, we have a social trust problem in this country, but that was a choice.

We have rules and laws that are designed to backstop social trust in this country, and it was a choice that we all lived under for four years with an administration that just refused to enforce them. It was a choice to open the borders to millions of people coming from societies that are not accustomed to that high trust who came here and exploited our systems, including by fraud.

President Trump and Vice President Vance have made the opposite choice. They have chosen to reinforce social trust, to restore an America where we can trust our neighbors, where the government looks out for its citizens, and where people who come here to prey on the rest of us, who come here to raid our programs, who come here to maim our citizens face consequences.

The money stays in the agencies thanks to American AI innovation, and when it does get out, the Department of Justice finds them and throws them in jail. That is because of President Trump and Vice President Vance making the choice to put American citizens first, to stop the fraud, to close the border, and make sure that our programs work for the people they're supposed to work for.

We've also heard a lot about the talent that President Trump and Vice President Vance have attracted to this. I just want to give a few acknowledgements to folks on the task force. Scott Brady was the US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania in the first Trump administration. He's the guy that brought down the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.

He's the executive director of the task force. The main job of the task force is to get all of the agencies working together so that one agency that has some authority to do something and the other that has the rest of it are working the same way. Scott's ability to coordinate across agencies, to help agencies stop fraud in the agencies and then to get the Department of Justice working to capture the ones that took advantage of the fraud has been unbelievable and it has been a privilege to work with him.

And this kind of talent is made possible only by the vice president, because he built this task force and then got the best people in America to come work at it. We have a 22-year-old staff assistant who every single day John Hague works with every single agency of the federal government and every component of the White House to get everyone moving in the same direction.

And the last two people I want to acknowledge are Anup Malani and Jetson Leder-Luis. They are two of the country's leading academic experts on benefits fraud. I have a very poor view of the academy in this country. I think that the American Academy is sick and has become deeply anti-American. These two men quit their prestigious tenure or tenure track jobs, came to Washington at an unbelievable pay cut just to work for the Vice President to stop fraud everywhere.

And every single day, I've got these guys coming to me and then my job is just to make sure that the vice president knows that it's happening with idea after idea across every single agency to keep money in the agencies, to make sure that money goes to the people it's responsible for, and the people who got it illegally go to jail.

I am incredibly pleased to be able to work with people like this and everyone else in the task force that I'll acknowledge later. But I wanna be very clear, you don't get this sort of talent. You don't get the technologists that we have at treasury and at HHS, you don't get economists like we have on the task force unless the President of the United States, Donald Trump, sets up this task force and the Vice President says, "Come to Washington.

We will fix this problem. We will make the opposite choice. We will put American citizens first." And that's what we have done. And with that, I will turn it back over to the Vice President.

Well, thank you, Andrew. And, uh, the last comment I'll make before I take some questions is, you know, the media will frame the choice about these programs, particularly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They'll say, this is what the media will say falsely, that Republicans don't like them and Democrats do. But the simple fact is that until a Republican administration empowered by the President of the United States came along, these programs were being stolen from.

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security were being stolen from by millions of fraudsters and it didn't stop until the Republican President put a stop to it. We've got so much more work to do, so much that we're excited about doing. But I would like any Democrat in Congress or at the state level, and we've had, to be fair, a few Democrats at the state level who have worked with our fraud task force.

Congressional Democrats should be rushing to support our efforts, to codify our efforts, to work with us across the entire country. You cannot protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid if you're allowing fraudsters to get rich off those program and to steal the benefits that ought by right go to American citizens.

So I'll make the same pitch that I make in every fraud task force. I want Democrats to work with us. It's up to them to actually care more about the American people than they do the fraudsters who are getting rich off of those same Americans. And with that, uh, I have my notes here that I'm supposed to take questions from, uh, CNN and Politico.

Anybody from CNN and Politico here? No? Okay. All right. In the green jacket.

Thank you. This is Elizabeth Mitchell from the Daily Signal. The House has recently passed several anti-fraud measures. Are you talking with Senate leadership about moving forward with codifying some of your fraud reforms during this session?

So, so we are talking to Senate leadership. Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa has really taken this by the horns. A number of our colleagues, Eric Schmitt from Missouri. Uh, but also, you know, the House has been very forward-leaning on this stuff. Obviously, it's a little bit easier in the House because they don't have the same set of legislative rules, stuff that I frankly don't fully understand, but I think the House has been a little bit more forward-leaning on this.

Uh, I think we've got a lot of work to do. There are some pieces of legislation that we think could be codified by the end of the term, um, meaning the end of the, the Senate term. So we're gonna keep on working with them. But look, it's a lot easier, and it would be a lot easier if congressional Democrats were willing to participate in this work.

And the pitch that I'd make to them is this is not about cutting off anybody from their benefits. It's about cutting off fraudsters from stealing from these programs. If you really believe in food stamps for low income moms and kids, if you really believe in the Medicare program that provides medical care to our elderly citizens, and I think that all of us do, then you should be falling over yourself to help us fight the fraud.

I don't know why congressional Democrats are so uninterested in this, but we'd love to have their help.

Can you break down the number a little bit more of the 750,000 individuals? Do you believe that all of these people do not exist or are there some real people with plans and now they are kicked off their plans?

So I'll let Dr. Oz, uh, speak to the details a little bit. My understanding of the 750,000 who we're cutting off today, it is a mixture of phantom people, people who don't exist, and it's also a mixture of people who clearly don't meet the eligibility requirement. And then again, there's another 420,000 where we're gonna do a little bit more diligence on those eligibility requirements, but that 750,000 is a mix of both phantom people, but also real people who just don't meet the eligibility requirements.

And to be clear here, when I say don't meet the eligibility requirements, I mean, for example, let's say a brokerage signs you up without your knowledge for these Obamacare benefits. You have no idea that you've been taken advantage of. That by the way, being signed up for an insurance program that you don't want can make it harder for you to access healthcare benefits down the road.

So you're being defrauded in multiple different ways. That 750,000 includes those people, people who were signed up fraudulently who never wanted these benefits and never asked for them. Did I miss anything, Dr. Oz?

Uh, beautifully stated. Uh, that 760,000 people, we call them phantoms because we believe most of them either don't exist or had no idea they had coverage, we believe that because we had been writing them, telexing them, you know, walking to them, FedExing, whatever we could possibly do to get into touch with them, they won't answer and they have never filed a claim.

So it meets all the criteria for us to pretty as much as any government can say, "You actually don't know you have this or you don't exist. You should be asking, if I could, another question, which is why didn't we take off the other 450,000 people? They're coming. But they, they had something about their story that was a little bit different than what we expected from the 100% fraud story.

So we're giving another chance to them to be able to try to tell us that they really have an in- -- a social security number or they really did have the insurance. Frankly, if you have a claim, it gives us confidence, you at least know you have insurance because we're not ans- -- we're not interested in taking innocent people off the rolls.

We're interested in protecting them from the bad guys. $2.2 billion is the money that they were stealing from the government. It was the money that people were getting.

Great. Let's go. Right here?

Thank you. Um, can you hear me?

I can.

Uh, Mr. Ferguson mentioned American AI innovation was playing a role. Can you talk about how AI is being used to identify these fraudulent cases you're identifying?

Yeah, I'll let the chairman speak to that, but my understanding is that we're using technology and tools to identify fraud at breakneck pace. So, so one just very concrete example. When you cut off a fraudster from one program, they sometimes will try to go and, and milk another program, a similar program, but you can actually see, using modern digital technology tools, you can actually see when one person who is defrauding one program migrates to another program.

I'm sure there's other ways. Andrew, you wanna talk about that?

Yeah. I mean, for program eligibility and un- -- dis eligibility based on fraud, it's not the same standard of proof as like a criminal conviction. It's basically pattern recognition. And, um, i- -- if you don't have AI, machine learning, et cetera, participating in recognizing patterns that are likely to be fraud, you need to have human beings basically hand counting this stuff.

That is a, that is one of the problems that we were confronting. Could have been fixed in the last administration, but one of the problems we were confronting is that there were tools available to dramatically speed the rate at which we were detecting fraud in dozens of programs, especially at HHS, which at $2 trillion is, is the biggest one.

And that's what we have done. And it's one of the most important things that the task force did. If you read the executive order of creating the task force, it set a bunch of technological requirements that agencies ne- -- have to meet to comply with the EO, most of which are about being able to detect fraud before it happens, before claims are paid, and then they can be cut off.

Now, of course, in most of those cases, if you aren't fraudulent, you can appeal back to the agency, explain your situation, and the agency will make payment. But as Dr. Oz has said repeatedly, when we do these big cutoffs, almost no one comes. Basically, all of them do one of two things. They sort of put up their hands, say, "Ah, you got me. Okay, like, we'll move on to the next thing." Or they move on to the next thing, as we were talking about here, which is they try to raid the program from a different angle.

But because teams like Kim's have access to this sort of technology, we're able to find them almost immediately and cut them off there too.

Great. Go ahead.

Um, thank you. Two questions. One, that 750,000 figure you guys laid out there, is it possible that people, um, that people who do qualify for the program are being mistakenly tagged in that large number? And then the second question, if quickly, just hoping to get a response about growing number of Republicans in battleground states calling to the end of the Iran war.

Well, first of all, we're doing everything that we can to identify the ways in which people are fraudulently enrolling in the program. And if we suspect that somebody is fraudulently enrolled or is enrolled without their own knowledge, we do a lot. As Dr. Oz said, we send them FedEx letters, we go to their house, we do everything that we can to ensure that their eligibility is actually viable.

And if it's not viable and we confirm that, then we try to kick them off because clearly they're not actually -- anybody who's not eligible, we don't want on the program. So I think that we're working much harder. We are putting ourselves under an extraordinary burden of proof. So those 750,000 people are people that we feel confident either don't know that they're enrolled in the program, aren't using the program at all or unaware of it, or as Dr. Oz said, are potentially phantom people who are enrolled against their will, or maybe they don't even exist.

It's just a person who exists on paper who was created to defraud the American taxpayer. And then on, on the second question, uh, I, you know, I, I haven't seen what, what you're talking about. I mean, I, I, I just campaigned with, uh, Michael Whatley and a couple of congressional Republicans in a very intense North Carolina battleground yesterday.

Uh, my sense is that people are obviously focused on the local issues that matter. You know, what matters to a North Carolina voter is gonna be a l- -- a little different than, you know, Mike Rogers, what he's gonna talk about in Michigan. So I think it's completely reasonable that Republicans are gonna tailor their campaign messages to the people that they're going to Washington or hope to go to Washington to represent, but I haven't seen that break.

What I've seen is people who are very excited about what we've done, and frankly, who don't wanna give Washington, control of Washington DC over to the far-left Democrats. Go ahead.

Thanks, Vice President. Um, can you speak to just how this fraud is affecting affordability? Um, obviously, uh, Obamacare is actually named the Affordable Care Act. Many would say it didn't actually make healthcare more affordable, but is this making healthcare more expensive?

Well, it's definitely making healthcare more expensive for a couple of different reasons. Number one, you have a lot of people in the healthcare system who engage in productive provision of healthcare to our fellow citizens, making people get well when they feel sick, doing preventative treatments and so forth.

Instead of doing that, they're trying to milk the system. They're trying to defraud the system. And I think it's a huge insult to all the amazing doctors, to the honest insurance brokers who are out there, to our nurses and everybody in our hospitals that they're working their fingers to the bones. Some of these guys have very long shifts.

They're working very hard in the healthcare system. And meanwhile, there are people who are making more money than them, not because they're providing a useful service to a sick person, but because they're defrauding the government. That absolutely makes things more expensive. The other way is just general cost inflation.

When you take $2 billion, again, that's 550,000 children's worth of healthcare, and you take that money out of the system and put it into fraud, that raises costs for everybody. I do think one of the underappreciated and under-told stories of the Biden administration's inflation crisis, again, the worst inflation in 48 years under Joe Biden's presidency is because we were taking hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer and we were giving it to a bunch of fraudsters.

We know that printing and spending money like that increases the pressure on inflation. The fact that we were printing that money, not to the benefit of American citizens, but to the benefit of fraudsters, it's both a moral travesty, but I absolutely think that it increased inflation as well.

Can I offer a comment?

Please, go ahead.

I'm gonna stay super simple. Fraud will destroy Obamacare. You cannot run an insurance s- -- uh, business if you have no idea who's coming in. You can't rate how sick they are. You have no idea if they're real. It throws all of your numbers up. All of the insurers are concerned about this. And there's a, a big opportunity for us to roll out Obamacare for private companies, small, uh, employer companies who wanna use the CHOICE program that we've been, we've done in Georgia and Indiana, going to Connecticut.

In red and blue states like these, small employers will not use Obamacare if they think that one third of the people are fraudulent, because they don't wanna join a club that's, that's gonna sink. And you wouldn't join it either. So it's, it- -- that- -- the affordability is a big problem, but it destroys something that we could salvage.

And Mr. Vice President, I haven't talked about this with you, but there is a So- -- we believe Soros funded a lawfare group. It's a d- -- it's a d- -- a aligned group of Democratic Party who has sued us 150 times on these issues. They just won a suit 'cause [Inaudible] shop that blocks us from checking the tax returns of people on Obamacare.

Just process that. Obamacare's for people m- -- making between one and four times the poverty level. They never said in the law that we needed to check the tax return 'cause that's self-evident in the law. We are now blocked from checking tax returns on Obamacare recipients, which means you could be a billionaire and get Obamacare, at least for a while, you can make no money and get Obamacare.

That's how you destroy a system. And it's a choice, as Chairman Ferguson said, and it, the wrong choice is being made by some Americans.

Just on that point, Dr. Oz, I mean, I, I struggle to understand the mindset and the psychology of a person who makes billions of dollars in the greatest country in the history of the world and decides to use that money not to maybe provide healthcare to people who need it, but to ensure that we're unable to check the eligibility criteria for programs that American people depend on. It's just a sick, sick use of charitable dollars.

What a, what a scandal that is. And thank you guys for fighting it in court and getting back to a point where we can do the common sense thing, which is check whether the people who get your tax dollars actually are entitled to get them. Mary Margaret?

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Uh, we reported this morning at Daily Wire that Planned Parenthood may be committing, uh, medical fraud by using improper billing codes when prescribing cross-sex hormones to gender confused young people. So we'd love to know is, is the fraud task force looking into Planned Parenthood on this front?

And then just a second question, uh, can you share a little more about what Trump TV is and why it comes at this point in time?

[Laughs] I'll let the president speak to Trump TV and, uh, I'm sure there will be forthcoming announcements on that particular topic. Um, on the first question, so I haven't seen the report that you're referencing. Mary Margaret, I don't know the answer to that question. We haven't, it sounds like we, we have some awareness that it's going on, but we haven't done the deep dive just yet.

So I, what, what I will do is we'll look into that reporting, we'll try to run to ground the facts of the case because we alw- -- always wanna be driven in the Fraud Task Force by what's actually happening, but we'll certainly take a look at it. And look, we do know from other cases, not necessarily Planned Parenthood, but we know from other cases that there was the fraudulent provision of cross-sex hormones, that people were using the wrong medical billing codes in order to give these therapies to children.

By the way, highly experimental, in some cases, irreversible, causing damage to kids, getting rich in the process. It's a complete scandal. And to the Democrats who talk a lot about standing up to big pharma, why didn't they stand up to big pharma when big pharma was selling billions of dollars of untested, unconfirmed, experimental treatments to children, in some cases causing those children a lot of damage in the process?

That is a scandal and just goes to show that so often the rhetoric of congressional Democrats doesn't actually meet with the reality. The final point I'll say, Mary Margaret, is I, I read your amazing piece on the Second Lady this morning, actually on the drive in here. It had one error, which is now, it's not your fault, but since you wrote that piece, the vice president's chickens have now laid two eggs, which is a cause for great excitement for the Vance children.

So you've got to update it because we've now got two eggs. They were little green ones and they tasted great. Thank you guys, good to see you.

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