Senate Leader John Thune Says GAO Audit Found Obamacare Handed Out Subsidies to 90% of Completely Fake Accounts

Senate Republican Leader John Thune took to the Senate floor with a bombshell revelation: a brand-new Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit shows that Obamacare’s subsidy system is so riddled with loopholes that 90% of GAO’s fake, fictitious identities were approved for taxpayer-funded health plans, without proper documentation.

According to the GAO’s findings, Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces, run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), approved subsidized health coverage for nearly all of the watchdog’s fictitious applicants in 2024 and 2025.

In other words, the federal government is sending real tax dollars to cover insurance for people who don’t exist.

And it gets worse.

GAO investigators created 20 fictitious identities, some with completely invalid Social Security numbers, some with mismatched personal information, and attempted to sign up for subsidized Obamacare plans through HealthCare.gov and broker-assisted channels.

The result? 18 of 20 fake applicants were approved and continued receiving benefits as of September 2025.

The federal government even paid over $10,000 per month in subsidies for these imaginary enrollees.

In late 2024, all four fake applicants received fully subsidized insurance.

GAO writes plainly that “the federal Marketplace approved subsidized coverage for nearly all of our fictitious applicants” and that these approvals strongly suggest persistent systemic weaknesses.

For example:

• One fake enrollee received approval after submitting no proof of income or identity.
• Brokers were able to push applications through even when SSNs were flagged as invalid.
• Some fake applicants were never asked to verify citizenship, income, or SSN at all.

GAO concluded that weaknesses in identity proofing, income verification, documentation requests, and backend fraud-control processes persist year after year, unchanged since similar failures GAO documented in 2014–2016.

The GAO report also details stunning examples of systemic breakdown:

1. SSNs used dozens — even hundreds — of times

GAO found over 29,000 Social Security numbers that were used for more than a full year of coverage in 2023 — an obvious hallmark of identity fraud. One SSN was used for over 26,000 days of cumulative subsidized coverage — equivalent to 71 years across 125 separate insurance policies.

2. Subsidies paid for enrollees matched to the Social Security death file

GAO identified over 58,000 SSNs receiving subsidies in 2023 that matched federal death records.

Among them:

• 7,000+ SSNs belonged to people who died before they were supposedly enrolled, and
• 19,000+ matched SSNs used in applications with entirely different names and birthdates, suggesting synthetic identity fraud.

At least $94 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies were connected to cases where SSNs matched deceased individuals.

3. $21 billion in subsidies showed no evidence of tax reconciliation

Obamacare requires recipients to reconcile subsidies on their tax returns. GAO found that in 2023 alone, $21 billion in subsidies showed no record of reconciliation with IRS tax filings — another massive indication of program exposure to fraud and noncompliance.

The GAO confirmed widespread abuse by Obamacare brokers, many of whom receive commissions based on the number of enrollments.

Investigators found at least 30,000 applications (2023) and at least 160,000 applications (2024) showed fingerprints of likely unauthorized enrollment changes, meaning brokers were quietly switching consumers’ plans—or signing them up without consent—to collect payouts.

CMS received:

• 183,000+ complaints of people being enrolled without consent, and

• 90,000+ complaints of unauthorized plan changes, before admitting the problem and suspending 850 brokers. CMS later reinstated all 850 due to “procedural requirements.” 

Senator Thune blasted Democrats for refusing to strengthen verification systems or stop bleeding taxpayer dollars:

“This is what the GAO found, the Government Accountability Office, Mr. President. And this just came out literally just this last week. That Obamacare subsidies granted without documentation to 90% of fake accounts.

So in other words, what the Government Accountability Office did is they ran an audit of the exchanges in which these insurance policies change hands and found that 90% of these fake accounts were granted subsidies without documentation.

And so we have spiraling health care costs, a program incredibly vulnerable, as this is evidence, vulnerable to fraud and abuse. And again, Democrats are proposing that we do. Absolutely nothing.”

Republicans have made it very clear that we would like to work with Democrats to address the affordability of health care and find solutions that actually reduce costs.

But Democrats are not really after health care solutions. They’re after a political issue. pic.twitter.com/UsQw8gtAr0

— Leader John Thune (@LeaderJohnThune) December 8, 2025

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