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The Trump administration is removing close to 750,000 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.
“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for non-existent ghosts,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said during a press conference.
Oz estimated about 35 percent of current people on the Obamacare exchanges have never used their insurance.
The effort is led by Vance’s White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which has been focusing much of its efforts on healthcare.
“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 were not concerned about real people getting kicked off their plans as a result of the new crackdown because most of them filed no claims, had no Social Security number or never responded 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 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 over 200 non-compliant 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.
Obamacare enrollment grew sharply during the Biden administration, but fell by more than 1 million people in President Trump’s first term in office. Those numbers are expected to drop even more this year.
Administration officials and congressional Republicans contend the estimates of the numbers 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 sign up, they argue.
About 19 million people are enrolled in health plans offered through the ACA’s exchanges, Health and Human Services officials said in June.
The Paragon Health Institute, an influential conservative think tank led by former Trump 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.
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 ACA 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,” Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said in a statement.
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