Trump pledges $500 ObamaCare rebate checks

The Trump administration is pledging to send $500 rebate checks to nearly 1 million Americans who the White House says were overcharged for ObamaCare coverage.

In a recorded message posted Thursday to the White House account on the social platform X, President Trump alleged without evidence that the Biden administration was “massively” overcharging enrollees on the federal health insurance exchange and then hiding it.

“Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off,” Trump said.

In a fact sheet, the White House claimed that former President Biden’s administration “accumulated a significant surplus of funds that were not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums.”

Trump said $500 checks would be mailed starting October to people in 30 states that used Healthcare.gov, the federal marketplace where people sign up for ObamaCare health insurance.

The rebate announcement comes as affordability and health costs take a central role ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Critics said the move was a desperate gimmick that won’t even come close to repairing the damage the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have done to the health system.

There are 19.2 million people enrolled in Affordable Care Act coverage, so only a small fraction will be eligible for the rebates. People who still get premium subsidies aren’t eligible, nor are the people who live in the mostly blue states that operate their own exchanges.

The recipients of these expected refunds are higher-income earners who no longer receive premium assistance after congressional Republicans, backed by the Trump administration, let the law’s enhanced subsidies expire at the end of last year.

Trump in the video claimed that “in many cases” the $500 would cover “the entire spike in your insurance,” which he blamed on Democrats.

But the loss of the enhanced subsidies caused many people’s premiums to double or even triple, prompting millions to downgrade their plans or drop coverage entirely.

Democrats shut down the government for a record 45 days last year in an attempt to negotiate an extension of the enhanced credits, but ultimately this effort was unsuccessful, and the government reopened without an extension.

Instead, Republicans promised to give them a vote on a bill of their choosing to extend the subsidies. The vote failed, and the subsidies expired at the start of this year.

Brad Woodhouse, president of the Democratic-aligned patient advocacy group Protect Our Care, said the rebate idea is “an absolute joke.”

“Five hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to what Americans are paying because Trump and Republicans gutted health care to bankroll massive tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations,” Woodhouse said in a statement. “At a time when people are scraping by to keep up with the high cost of groceries, rent, and health care, this $500 gimmick won’t even begin to dig them out of the hole that Trump and Republicans created.”

The ObamaCare rebates are separate from the $5,000 checks Trump promised to give to every American if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate.

Direct payments to consumers are a key part of Trump’s health plan. The president has touted taking money intended for enhanced ObamaCare subsidies and paying it directly back to Americans to let them purchase their own health insurance.

It’s not clear whether every American receiving a check overpaid by $500, or in which year the overpayments happened.

The money for the rebates would come from what the White House says is a $500 million fund of excess user fees, which are paid by insurance companies to the government to help run healthcare.gov.

The fees have typically been used to cover services like technology support, call center operations and outreach efforts to enroll more Americans in health insurance plans. However, the Trump administration has slashed funding for outreach efforts.

The fee is a percentage of the value of the monthly premiums the insurer collects on exchange plans in a given state, and the Department of Health and Human Services updates the percentage each year through rulemaking.

The Affordable Care Act already has a mechanism for health insurance companies to send rebates to consumers who are overcharged, and it’s not known how Trump’s plan will interact with the existing function.

The so-called medical loss ratio rebate is sent when insurers don’t spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on healthcare. The rebate checks in 2025 amounted to about $1.6 billion, according to health research group KFF. They were issued to 5.1 million people with individual coverage and 3.5 million people with employer coverage.

In the individual market, the 2025 average rebate per person was $233, while the average rebate per person for the small group market and the large group market were $190 and $91, respectively, KFF found.