Vance-led antifraud efforts slashes 750,000 from ACA enrollment

Vice President JD Vance and top Trump health administration officials announced today that they are removing 750,000 enrollees from Affordable Care Act plans and are in the process of investigating 419,000 other people to see if they were eligible for the program.

At the same press conference, which was late this morning, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said the administration was putting a six-month moratorium on new ACA brokers as a tactic for preventing future fraud.

Vance said that canceling subsidy payments for 750,000 enrollees would save the federal government $2.2 billion. He said the investigation of the other enrollees would involve checking to see if they are legal residents of the U.S. and if they met income requirements.

In June 2026, the office of assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS announced that enrollment in ACA plans was 19.2 million. In a foreshadowing of today’s press conference, that announcement said that nearly half of the surge in the enrollment in ACA plans from 2021 to 2024 was suspected of being “improper, phantom, or fraudulent.” The right-leaning Paragon Health Institute has published several reports with titles such as “Great Obamacare Enrollment Fraud” that the institute says documents both the scope and various aspects of widespread ACA enrollment fraud.

Today Vance laid blame on the Biden administration for what the Vance and other Trump health officials said is fraud orchestrated by brokers who get paid commissions by insurers to sign people up for the ACA. Those schemes, Vance said, sometimes involve enrolling people who don’t exist. Vance said the Biden administration relaxed eligibility for ACA and didn’t check on whether people were being legitimately enrolled.

“You have a system where, on the one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system while, on the other hand, the government isn’t even checking whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program,” Vance said today. “What do you have? Of course, rampant, rampant fraud.”

Oz said today that 35% of people “currently on the Obamacare system” have never used the healthcare system. “They haven’t bought a prescription medication. They haven’t seen a doctor,” he said, and that is an indication that enrollment was fraudulent. Oz also said that 1.1 million people enrolled in ACA plans this year without listing a Society Security number. Without a number to verify that they are in the country legally, Oz said, “we went after them.”

President Donald Trump has been a critic of the ACA. During his first administration, “repeal and replace” efforts failed. While not defending fraud, some defenders of the law and the expanded healthcare coverage it brought to the U.S. see the Trump’s administration emphasis on fraud as part of pattern of undercutting the ACA and what Democrats have trumpeted as a lasting, politically popular achievement of the Obama administration.

In addition to accusing the Biden administration of laxity that allowed the enrollment fraud to happen, the Trump administration frames fraud as causing harm beyond misuse and theft of funds.

“Fraud is not just about stealing our money. Fraud is actually, even more so, stealing our health, stealing our lives, and maybe most importantly, fraud steals our trust,” said Oz at the press conference.