Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force is expected to say that the people were wrongly signed up for the government health care program.
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Vice President JD Vance and administration officials are set to announce Tuesday that they are removing hundreds of thousands of people from Affordable Care Act coverage, saying that they were fraudulently enrolled in the government health program, according to three people with knowledge of the forthcoming announcement.
The administration also is set to suspend some brokers found to have wrongly signed up enrollees for ACA coverage, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans not yet made public.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the administration’s push to remove the ACA enrollees and suspend some insurance brokers. Administration officials told The Washington Post earlier this year that the anti-fraud task force was examining the issue of ACA enrollment fraud.
The White House referred questions about the announcement to Vance’s office, which did not immediately respond. Spokespeople for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also did not immediately respond Tuesday morning.
About 19 million people are enrolled in health plans offered through the ACA’s exchanges, HHS officials said in June. Enrollment in the program, which shot up under President Joe Biden, has shrunk by more than 1 million people since Trump took office and is expected to fall by millions more this year.
Vance, who is leading a White House anti-fraud task force, has targeted health care programs in his push to trim federal spending by billions of dollars. Vance and President Donald Trump have also long criticized the ACA, a sweeping health law established by then-President Barack Obama and Democrats in 2010. The law’s expansion of health coverage is credited with driving the nation’s uninsured rate to historic lows, and past GOP efforts to target the program helped Democrats win back seats in Congress.
Democrats and some health policy experts have argued that Trump’s polices, including ending coronavirus-era subsidies that widely lowered the cost of ACA coverage, have forced people off the program and put them at risk of losing access to care. Republicans contend that dwindling enrollment is the result of necessary initiatives to cut waste and fraud after Democrats focused on growing the program but did too little to scrutinize who was signing up.
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Some conservative lawmakers and policy experts had recently pushed for another crackdown, saying that fraudulent ACA enrollment had spiked after covid-era initiatives that made it easier to sign up for coverage — and created incentives for bad actors to take advantage of the program.
Brian Blase, the founder of the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank that has driven attention on ACA enrollment fraud, welcomed the administration’s move.
The think tank estimated earlier this year that about 6 million ACA enrollees were fraudulent, a number that includes “phantom enrollees” either unaware they’d signed up or fabricated by brokers.
“The Trump administration actions to suspend brokers engaged in these activities and disenroll phantoms is welcome and will save taxpayers billions of dollars each year,” said Blase, who was an economic aide to Trump in his first administration.
Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the ACA, has previously said that his agency believes perhaps one-third of ACA enrollment is improper.
“If you care about the ACA, then you’ll want us to take the fraud out,” Oz said at a White House news briefing in June.
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This is a developing story and will be updated.
