The Trump administration is removing 760,000 people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace on allegations of fraud, officials said on Tuesday – adding to previous efforts to chip away at federally subsidized insurance programs and likely causing some of the lowest-income Americans to forego healthcare, experts said. The US government is also investigating about 420,000 people whom they suspect of fraud, and they are putting a six-month enrollment moratorium on new agents and brokers selling Obamacare policies, officials said at a press conference. The removed enrollees are a mixture of “phantoms” and “ghosts” as well as people who don’t meet the eligibility requirements of Obamacare, said Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
JD Vance, who is leading a federal taskforce on fraud, claimed: “We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them.” No details were provided about how many enrollees were fictional, enrolled by fraudulent brokers without their knowledge or expelled because of income restrictions. The move follows recent rules and legislation to reduce enrollment in Medicaid, Medicare and the ACA, said Park, who added: “A lot of these actions are intended to sharply undercut the success of and the long-term viability of the ACA’s coverage expansions, which have been an incredible success in terms of reducing the number of people without health insurance.” About 19.2 million Americans are enrolled in the ACA marketplace, but nearly 3 million people lost their coverage between February 2025 and February 2026, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The fraud taskforce has also withheld $2.2bn in Medicaid payments from California and Minnesota over alleged fraud – primarily in home health aide programs, which disability advocates say are a lifeline.
Officials followed an unusual path to verify ACA enrollment, experts said. The administration sent to insurers a list of more than a million people suspected of being fraudulently enrolled in the ACA marketplace, also known as Obamacare. Officials said on Tuesday that they used AI tools to identify the enrollees.
The people were identified by three factors: they’d been enrolled by a broker or agent, had all of their ACA premium paid by the tax credit, and they had not supplied social security numbers or immigration documents. Insurers were asked to try to make contact with those enrollees; they were permitted to filter out people who had a previous claim or had communicated with the insurer. The enrollees had 30 days to respond, or their coverage was canceled.
Ending unscrupulous broker practices has been a bipartisan issue, and the Biden administration was the first to act, finalizing a rule to crack down on shady brokers. Officials under Biden decertified about 200 such brokers – but Trump administration officials recertified them last year. About 35% of ACA enrollees have never used their health insurance, Oz said.
Some enrollees also appear to have been cut because they are low-income. The Affordable Care Act was intended to include a Medicaid expansion for those living under the poverty line, but a supreme court decision made the expansion optional. In states that chose not to expand Medicaid, there is a group of low-income people who make too much money to qualify for Medicaid – earning between $16,000 and $22,000 per year – but don’t make enough to qualify for the ACA.
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