Trump Confirms 1 Million Americans Will Get $500 Rebate Checks

President Donald Trump at an Oklahoma rally on Thursday confirmed that his administration is now sending $500 Affordable Care Act rebate checks to nearly 1 million people who were overcharged for their coverage in recent years.

The administration said last month that it would send payments to people overcharged under the Biden administration through health insurance marketplaces. The president and White House said at the time that the previous administration overcharged people through user fees passed on to consumers via higher health insurance premiums.

Under the Biden administration, the federal government “accumulated a significant surplus of funds that were not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums,” a Sept. 10 White House fact sheet stated.

The White House framed the move as an attempt to place “the American people over big health insurance companies” and accused the previous administration of providing “profit windfalls for big health insurance companies.”

Some Americans in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are due to receive the payments, according to the fact sheet.

Trump said during Thursday’s rally that checks were sent to about 150,000 families in Oklahoma and Texas on Wednesday.

Vice President JD Vance and other Trump administration officials said in September that they plan to remove 760,000 Obamacare enrollees from public healthcare exchanges, alleging that the individuals were fraudulently enrolled in the program or do not exist.

Vance said discovering and canceling subsidy payments for hundreds of thousands of people from the exchanges, part of an administration-wide crackdown on fraud, would save $2.2 billion.

“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Vance, who leads a government task force to eliminate fraud, said.

The vice president said the cancellation of about 315,000 enrollments covering 760,000 people was partly because the government was not checking whether enrollees were eligible. He said a further 419,000 enrollments will undergo additional verification to ensure they are eligible for the benefit.

The move to send the payments comes just a week after Trump headlined a rally in Dallas meant to boost Republican voter turnout in the upcoming midterm elections.

Trump said at the time that if Republicans retained control over the House of Representatives and Senate, he would send $5,000 payments that he called the Trump dividend. An official in his administration later said the payments would not be funded by taxpayer revenue or by increasing the national debt amid criticism from Democrats.

A left-leaning think tank, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said after Trump’s announcement that the payments would balloon the national deficit and increase inflation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.