President Donald Trump on Sept. 10 said he is providing $500 rebate checks to nearly 1 million people who he said were “wrongly overcharged” through the Affordable Care Act—former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, known as Obamacare.
“Our administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off,” Trump said in a video address released through the White House’s X account.
Trump added that those Americans were forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars under the previous administration. He also chided Democrats for backing major insurance companies.
The check will be “sent to their home address” in the near future, the president added.
A fact sheet released by the White House on Sept. 10 alongside the video featuring Trump said that “user fees” incurred by Obamacare plan exchanges were ultimately passed on to Americans through higher premiums that provided funding that exceeded the amount used to run the exchange.
The previous administration was able to acquire “a significant surplus of funds that were not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums,” the White House said.
Trump, it said, will now send the refunds of “these excess fees to Americans who do not receive premium assistance” in 30 states that use the federal exchange for their Obamacare health insurance markets.
The states are 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.
Trump’s Sept. 10 announcement comes as he and Republicans have promised financial incentives for voting for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms.
In a speech to a crowd in Dallas on Sept. 9, the president said he would provide a $5,000 dividend payment to adult U.S. citizens if Republicans win the House and the Senate during the midterm elections in November, with the caveat that the money must be spent in the United States. Republicans currently hold slim majorities in both congressional chambers.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said in a post on X that he would back the idea and is drafting a “Trump Dividend” bill in response to the president’s speech.
Last year, Republicans proposed multiple alternatives as enhanced Obamacare-related subsidies neared expiration. At one point, Trump backed a plan he dubbed “Trumpcare” that would send funds directly to individuals to shop for insurance coverage instead of providing the funds to insurance companies.
Trump, who has long been critical of Obama’s marquee insurance program, told Fox News in November 2025 that he would like “money to go into an account for people where the people buy their own health insurance.”
“The insurance will be better. It’ll cost less. Everybody’s going to be happy. They’re going to feel like entrepreneurs,” he said. “They’re actually able to go out and negotiate their own insurance. And they can use it only for that reason. That’s the beauty, only for the purpose. And if we did that, that would be so exciting.”
And in July, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz said they would increase their efforts to combat what they described as fraud in the Obamacare marketplace.
In a video address, the two said that more than 1 million enrollees in the program lack Social Security numbers, which Kennedy described as a “glaring warning sign of fraud.”
