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.
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.