Barack Obama hasn’t been receiving Obamacare royalties

Claims that former US president Barack Obama has been receiving millions of dollars a year in royalties from Obamacare have been circulating online. But these claims aren’t true—they originate from a satire website.

Posts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) have shared a photograph of Mr Obama and claim: “DOGE stopped an annual payment to Barack Obama for $2.6 million for ‘royalties associated with Obamacare.’ He's been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $39 million in taxpayer dollars.”

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, and is an advisory body which was recently created by President Donald Trump for the purpose of cutting costs in federal spending. It is not an official government department.

‘Obamacare’ is a widely used nickname for the Affordable Care Act, which was legislated in 2010 under Mr Obama’s presidency and implemented in 2014, with the aim of reducing the healthcare costs of Americans and increasing their access to affordable health insurance.

However, the claim that Mr Obama has been receiving royalties from the use of ‘Obamacare’ since 2010 is not true. The earliest example we could find of this was from a satire website and Facebook page called ‘America’s Last Line of Defense’, which shared the claim on 25 February.

The ‘about’ section on the Facebook page states: “Nothing on this page is real.” And the ‘about us’ page on the website the page links to also says that “everything on this website is fiction”, and ‘America’s Last Line of Defense’ is a network of “parody, satire and tomfoolery”.

Some of the posts shared by the page, including the original version of the claim about Mr Obama, include a small watermark which also says that ‘nothing on this page is real’.

We could find no credible reports of Mr Obama having trademarked ‘Obamacare’ and no evidence he has received any recurring payments from the US government for the use of the term.

This appears to be a variation of a claim which previously circulated in 2017 and falsely claimed that the United States Treasury had paid $411 million for “Royalty Payments for Obamacare”. This was debunked at the time by US fact checkers at PolitiFact.

This is not the first time Full Fact has seen satirical content being shared online by people who believe it’s genuine. We previously debunked a claim originating from the same page that Malia Obama had received $2.2 million from USAID, and a viral video of a woman claiming her 14-month-old baby was transgender.