Vice President JD Vance and other Trump administration officials said Tuesday they plan to remove 760,000 Affordable Care Act enrollees from public healthcare exchanges, alleging that the individuals were fraudulently enrolled in the program, or simply do not exist.
Vance said the discovery and canceled subsidy payments for hundreds of thousands of people from the exchanges, part of an administration-wide crackdown on fraud, would result in $2.2 billion in cost savings.
“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” said Vance, who leads a government task force to eliminate fraud. He was flanked by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, and other administration officials.
Vance said the cancellation of approximately 315,000 enrollments covering 760,000 people was done in part because the government was not checking whether people enrolled were eligible. Vance said another 419,000 enrollments will get additional verification to make sure they are eligible for the benefit.
The Trump administration also announced a six-month suspension on new agents or brokers who sign up enrollees for healthcare coverage, who officials say commit a disproportionate amount of the fraud they uncovered.
Roughly 19.2 million Americans are actively enrolled in ACA marketplace health plans as of early 2026, according to the HHS website.
Tuesday’s announcement is the latest in an initiative by the Trump administration to address fraud around the country, including in federal healthcare programs, which officials say is needed to rein in runaway spending and protect taxpayers.
This is very confusing because ACA plans are for profit, so one pays more into them than they get out, even if they’re subsidized. So this is really not a thing that everyday people would would be doing and if anyone were manufacturing fake people to sell insurance to it would be someone high up at insurance companies.
Well, sort of. ACA plan carriers are private, but the advanced premium subsidies are provided by the tax payer. There are totally private companies that act as healthcare “navigators” essentially helping people navigate their ACA benefits. Those firms receive a payout on a per-sign up basis in most cases. I’ve applied both directly and with one of those firms, and it did make things significantly easier. I have no doubt there are sketchy ones that sign people up for services they’re not eligible for or make people up entirely. It’s no different from fraud medical device companies that collect the money from medicare for “selling” someone a mobility scooter or the like, but there’s no scooter and sometimes no person. Fraud does happen.
But it’s a distraction to the biggest fraud which is that private plans are funded by the US government in the first place. We have socialized healthcare already in the USA, just in the most painful, cruel, ass backwards, inefficient way possible.
Conservatives have a deep need to cause harm to others, especially vulnerable people. Harming others is one of the few things that can bring a conservative any happiness at all.
The $2.2 billion they claimed they saved is enough to run the federal government for about four hours.
Meanwhile, ICE has $45 billion dedicated to concentration camps alone.
And that is without mentioning the even more colossal waste of money that is Trumps Iran war.
Should be illegal to kick them off unless you can prove to a court there was fraud. They probably asked some dumbass AI to look for fraud and it found 760,000 people named John Smith and assumed it was fraud.
Vance said the cancellation of approximately 315,000 enrollments covering 760,000 people was done in part because the government was not checking whether people enrolled were eligible.
Translation: The executive branch has not been executing its mission, and is now using that as an excuse to cancel healthcare for 760K people.
Unfortunately, the current administration doesn’t exactly follow the law.
Even if it was on the books, we might have still gotten this result.
Yeah, with the FBI letting a known honeypot pedo run for president no amount of laws would have saved us from the cowards in power.
I’m confused on what “don’t exist” means. Why would someone sign up a fake person, which doesn’t even exist on paper, to health insurance? If they don’t exist, they can’t use the health insurance. So are they claiming the insurance companies are the ones committing fraud? Because they are the only ones that would benefit.
Some states don’t require patients to provide any ID when receiving care, so in those cases it’s a lot easier for someone to pretend to be a person with insurance. I don’t know how likely it is these particular people are colluding with insurance brokers. Maybe just a different type of fraud. But the easiest way to prevent this kind of fraud is to require that all states check ID… you know, if they actually cared about preventing fraud…
I don’t think they typically accept insurance without ID though do they? That seems like insurance fraud heaven if that’s the case.
It makes more sense if you consider that they don’t believe “brown people” are “real people”, therefore they don’t really “exist”, don’t deserve “insurance”, and can go “die”.
It’s just an excuse to hurt people they don’t like.
This is being done to fund their tax cuts for the rich. Never forget that.
Nah. It’s done to drive revenue to Healthcare companies.
I’m not sure I follow your logic there. As I understand it the subsidies are paid to the health insurance companies (which I assume is what you’re referring to as “Healthcare companies”) to get people access to cheaper plans. The people who need those subsidies basically can’t afford a plan without them, so this will actually drive a lot of people off insurance, reducing income for the insurance companies.
And if you actually did mean the healthcare providers, not the insurance companies, they don’t benefit either, because driving people off insurance means they’ll take less elective and preventative care. Plus uninsured patients are a lot less reliable at paying their bills. So either way you slice it, I really can’t see how this is a win for the corporations, unless there’s something I’m missing here.
Obamacare is government-subsidized healthcare. Get rid of Obamacare recipients and those subsidies disappear. Now The People have to pay them to the healthcare companies instead of getting it paid by the gov.
OK? Why do the companies care? They’re getting paid either way. And with the subsidies in place, they’re getting paid far more reliably.
They’re not getting paid either way. If the govt pays it, then they are cut out. And the govt will likely also negotiate lower prices.
Are you… Are you actually still not comprehending that they’re the ones getting paid by the government?
These subsidies are not paid to the doctor or hospital. They are paid to the insurance company the person has selected on the marketplace. A lot of these people cannot afford these plans without the subsidies and therefore the healthcare company will get less/no money from them.
Maybe you could make the argument that the insurance companies are losing money on these plans offered to these people but knowing what I pay personally for marketplace insurance I doubt that.
They simply don’t pay for insurance and then go to the hospital only for emergencies and continue to overwhelm the system. This is meant to punish poor people.
Not sure if you don’t realize this but the hospitals will often just refuse treatment if you don’t have insurance.
Do the subsidies flow to health insurance companies providing the plans on the marketplace? In other words, does UnitedHealthcare bill Obamacare for each customer receiving a subsidy? And they suspect UH is signing up fake people? Sounds like the insurance company executives need to go to jail instead of just terminating consumer plans.
Are they allowed to enroll again?
