Vice President JD Vance took to the podium at the White House on Tuesday to provide the country with a very encouraging update on his and his team’s efforts to identify and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.
Vance, who was made a ‘fraud czar’ by President Donald Trump over the summer, said that the team had identified more than 1 million people “fraudulently enrolled” in government health insurance colloquially known as “Obamacare,” named after then-President Barack Obama, who signed legislation creating the program in 2010.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said.
Previously, his team announced they had identified some 750,000 people who were defrauding the program. Since then, the team has identified an additional 419,000 people, bringing the total to well over 1.1 million.
The vice president said the discoveries will save taxpayers around $2.2 billion annually.
Vance said the team will focus primarily on two things: Whether enrollees are in the country legally and whether they meet income eligibility requirements.
Last month, Vance and his team took a significant new step following the release of a federal fraud investigation, putting the findings directly in the hands of the nation’s top law enforcement officials.
The vice president says that if investigators determine certain conduct outlined in the report was intentional, those responsible shouldn’t merely face professional consequences.
Vance referred findings from a new Department of Health and Human Services report examining pediatric gender medicine and insurance billing practices to Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Department of Justice for review of potential violations of federal law.
The HHS report, titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine,’” examines insurance coding associated with treatments including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones provided to minors, Conservative Brief reported at the time.
NEW: VP Vance announces a major fraud crackdown, stopping enrollment for roughly 750,000 people the administration believes are fraudulently enrolled in Obamacare.
Vance says the move will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently… pic.twitter.com/E8KmrZU3Wr
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 22, 2026
According to HHS, more than 225 hospitals and health systems established pediatric gender programs across the United States.
Nationwide insurance claims data covering 2015 through 2025 identified approximately $50 million in claims for puberty-blocking drugs billed using the diagnostic code for “endocrine disorder, unspecified,” according to the report.
HHS also identified nearly $11 million in claims involving patients between 13 and 17 years old that were billed using a precocious puberty diagnosis code.
The report says precocious puberty diagnoses would typically be inappropriate for patients older than 13.
All-payer claims data cited by HHS additionally showed nearly $120 million in billed charges since 2019 for related procedures involving minors, including more than 5,500 surgical procedures and approximately 8,500 courses of hormones or puberty blockers.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has separately referred a defined group of claims displaying what the department described as potentially anomalous billing patterns to the HHS Inspector General.
Those claims include puberty blockers paired with an unspecified endocrine disorder diagnosis without accompanying gender dysphoria or precocious puberty codes for patients between 9 and 17 years old.
The referral also covers claims using precocious puberty codes for patients ages 13 through 17 and certain same-day cross-sex hormone prescriptions accompanied by a primary gender dysphoria diagnosis in states restricting those treatments for minors.
Vance highlighted some of the report’s findings in his letter to Blanche.
“One study showed that only about 4.7 percent of patients diagnosed with ‘endocrine disorder, unspecified,’ had that actual condition,” Vance wrote.
“Another notes a 30 percent increase in the number of endocrine disorder diagnoses, despite it being unlikely that there has been a substantial increase in pediatric endocrine disorders,” he continued.
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