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.