The White House Fraud Task Force announced Wednesday that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has cut off Obamacare subsidies for 189,000 people who were also enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid, or who were deceased. It is the latest move in an effort the administration says has already recovered billions by resuming checks the prior administration had stopped running.

The savings claim rests on a process called Periodic Data Matching, which compares enrollment records across federal health programs to catch duplicate coverage. According to the White House, that comparison was largely dormant from 2021 through 2024, leaving a backlog the current administration says it inherited and is now working through.

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From the Daily Wire:

The Fraud Task Force will announce Wednesday morning that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has canceled Obamacare subsidies for 189,000 people who also had either Medicare or Medicaid, or were deceased.

Under the Biden administration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services stopped checking for duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare enrollment between 2021 and 2024, a White House official said. The Trump White House has once again begun the process, called Periodic Data Matching, and used it to uncover the latest fraud.

“When it comes to program integrity, the Biden Administration was sleeping on the job,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz told The Daily Wire. “They paused looking for duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare coverage for four years, creating a backlog of hundreds of thousands of duplicate enrollments.”

The numbers behind the announcement are cumulative. When President Donald Trump took office, officials said they found 551,000 instances of duplicate Medicaid and Obamacare enrollment. The administration says it saved nearly $4.4 billion in 2025 through these reviews, and that the newest cancellations will save taxpayers more than $1.5 billion a year. Oz told The Daily Wire the effort has already saved nearly $6 billion, which roughly matches the other two figures added together. Last month, the task force moved to shut down 750,000 Obamacare enrollments it identified as fraudulent, a step that included a crackdown on insurance brokers and agents the White House suspects of abusing the program.

CMS says it is following a deliberate process rather than cutting people off outright. If records suggest duplicate coverage, the agency contacts the individual and asks whether they in fact hold both. If the person responds within 30 days and says they do not, the subsidies stay in place. If the person does not respond, CMS cancels the subsidies, and for those on Medicare, that coverage as well. The agency says it follows a similar protocol for the deceased. Officials describe two common paths into duplicate enrollment: applicants lying about income to obtain low-cost private coverage alongside government health care, and brokers stealing the information of low-income Americans to sign them up without their knowledge. Vice President JD Vance said at a press conference on the effort, “We’re actually making sure that people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren’t doing that before.”

Intercessors should care because this is a question about honesty with other people’s money. Scripture says whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and that the Lord detests dishonest scales but delights in accurate weights. Taxpayer dollars are entrusted to the government for a purpose, and when that trust is broken, either by an individual gaming the system or by an agency that simply stops checking, the cost lands on working families who paid in first. Pray that these reviews continue and that they are done fairly, so that no one entitled to coverage is cut off by an error, and no one stealing from the program walks away with it. Pray for the brokers and agents who exploit the poor by enrolling them without consent, that they would be exposed and stopped. Pray for the people caught in the middle, especially the elderly and low-income families, who deserve clear notice and a real chance to respond. And pray for Congress to make this kind of routine verification permanent, to ensure program integrity.

Let’s pray for honest administration of our tax dollars, for protection of the vulnerable, and for leaders willing to do the unglamorous work of guarding the public trust.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from the Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley).