White House Cancels 760,000 Obamacare Enrollments Over Fraud Claims

The Trump administration has canceled roughly 315,000 Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollments covering about 760,000 people, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday.

The cancellations, carried out last month, target what the administration calls unauthorized enrollments. Vice President JD Vance characterized the problem as "rampant fraud."

The enforcement action goes further. CMS said it is verifying roughly 419,000 additional people to confirm they are legal U.S. residents and meet income threshold requirements to receive benefits through the ACA's public exchanges.

The vice president's White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud led the purge. The task force estimates the cancellations will save roughly $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Speaking at a Tuesday briefing, Vance placed blame on the prior administration. "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. What do you have? Of course, rampant, rampant fraud," Vance said.

Key questions remain unanswered. It is unclear how many of the 315,000 canceled enrollments involved people who were not actually eligible for coverage, or whether the Biden administration had failed to verify their eligibility in the first place.

The action fits a broader pattern. The Trump administration has made widespread accusations of fraud in U.S. health programs and has moved to restrict funding and eligibility for the federal-state Medicaid program.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, speaking at the same briefing, claimed that around 35% of people currently in the Obamacare system "have never used the program." He said those people never filled a prescription or saw a doctor.

That statistic carries a complication. The Affordable Care Act includes an individual mandate requiring most people to buy insurance, in part because having healthier people who use less care in the pool makes coverage more affordable for everyone. The federal penalty for going without coverage, however, has stood at $0 since 2019.

Obamacare plans, created under President Barack Obama's 2010 law, offer subsidies based on household size and estimated yearly income. President Donald Trump failed to overturn the legislation during his first term but has since proposed modifications that would make the plans less comprehensive.

Oz traced the problem to the pandemic. Bad actors, he argued, were drawn to ACA marketplace subsidies when federal spending surged during the Covid-19 crisis. He pointed to enrollment growth from about 10 million people before the pandemic to roughly 22 million after, and argued that weakened safeguards and a lack of enforcement under the Biden administration opened the door to improper enrollments.

A June report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the principal policy advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, supports part of that account. Obamacare plans experienced "unprecedented enrollment growth from 2021 to 2024," the report found, and of that growth, "nearly half ... was suspected to be improper, phantom, or fraudulent." The report defined improper or fraudulent enrollment as individuals misstating their income to gain access to free plans.

The enrollment spike followed the American Rescue Plan, the Covid response bill passed in 2021, which enhanced available subsidies to make healthcare more affordable during the crisis. Congress extended those broader credits, but they expired at the end of 2025, raising premiums for many people covered through ACA exchanges.

An estimated 19.2 million Americans are currently enrolled in Obamacare plans, according to the report. With 760,000 coverage cancellations now on the books and 419,000 more cases under review, insurers, brokers and enrollees face the near-term question of how the verification sweep reshapes exchange economics as enhanced subsidies disappear.