Vance-led task force set to remove 750K ObamaCare enrollees, citing fraud

The Trump administration is removing close to 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage due to allegedly fraudulent enrollment, Vice President Vance announced Tuesday.

The cancellations would save an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds, officials said.

“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said during a White House press conference.

Oz and Vance said officials are planning to do “some additional verification” on about 419,000 people who they also suspect of being fraudulently enrolled.

“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving ObamaCare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” the vice president said.

Oz estimated that about 35 percent of people currently on the ObamaCare exchanges have never used their insurance.

The effort is being led by Vance’s White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud , which has been focusing much of its efforts on healthcare. The task force recently has been involved with White House efforts to withhold billions of dollars in Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California, alleging the states have not done enough to combat fraud.

“This is not about cutting off anybody from their benefits. It’s about cutting off fraudsters from stealing from these programs,” Vance said Tuesday.

Oz and Vance said they are not concerned about real people getting kicked off their plans as a result of the new crackdown because most of them didn’t file claims, have Social Security numbers or respond to outreach efforts.

“We are putting ourselves under an extraordinary burden of proof,” Vance said. “So those 750,000 people are people that we feel confident either don’t know that they’re enrolled in the program, aren’t using the program at all, are unaware of it or … are potentially phantom people who are enrolled against their will, or maybe they don’t even exist.”

The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated there were around 2.3 million people in 2025 who improperly claimed eligibility for ObamaCare tax credits because they intentionally overstated their income.

The administration is also putting a six-month moratorium on all new brokers and agents who signed individuals up for health insurance. Since January 2026, CMS has terminated more than 200 noncompliant agents and brokers, the agency said.

Ahead of November’s midterm elections, Republicans are looking for a healthcare affordability message and a counter to Democratic attacks that the expiration of enhanced ObamaCare subsidies and health cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will drive up costs and increase the number of uninsured Americans.

ObamaCare enrollment grew sharply during the Biden administration but has fallen by several million people this year after Republicans in Congress allowed extra subsidies that helped people buy coverage to expire.

Costs soared due to the loss of enhanced subsidies, and many low-income people were faced with expensive plans that were previously free. Many either dropped coverage completely or shifted to less expensive plans with high deductibles.

About 19 million people are enrolled in health plans offered through the ACA’s exchanges, officials from the Health and Human Services Department said in June.

Administration officials and congressional Republicans contend the estimates of the number of people losing insurance have been overblown, and the losses that do happen are a result of cutting waste and fraud.

Democrats and the Biden administration were focused on boosting enrollment at all costs without putting enough safeguards in place to properly verify the people who signed up, they argued.

“This is what the fraud task force is all about,” the vice president said. “On the one hand, saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are protected from fraud and abuse.

The Paragon Health Institute, an influential conservative think tank led by President Trump’s former economic aide Brian Blase, has focused much of its attention on ACA enrollment fraud.

The organization earlier this year found more than 6 million people were improperly enrolled in the health law’s exchanges in 2026. The report also argued taxpayers will improperly subsidize the ACA by nearly $25 billion.

The Democratic-aligned advocacy group Protect Our Care said the action is a “smokescreen” designed to kick more eligible people off their coverage and that the administration doesn’t actually care about fighting fraud.

The group noted that last May, the Trump administration reinstated 850 ObamaCare brokers and agents suspected of fraud.

“Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick. Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that. It’s a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered but to shower billionaires with tax breaks instead,” Brad Woodhouse, Protect Our Care’s president, said in a statement.