Vance-led task force moves to strip 760,000 people of ACA coverage

Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced Tuesday that a White House task force will remove 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act coverage over allegations of fraudulent enrollment, with another 419,000 enrollees flagged for additional verification.

Vance said the effort, called the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, would save $2.2 billion in federal spending. “This is what the fraud task force is all about,” Vance said. “Saving the American taxpayers money, and on the other hand, ensuring that these programs that are very important” are protected from waste and fraud.

Oz framed the removals as a defense of the program itself. “If you care about the ACA, then you’ll want us to take the fraud out,” he said.

Chris Klomp, a senior official at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the administration shifted to a “stop and caught” model that uses artificial intelligence analytics and pattern recognition to identify fraudulent sign-ups, according to reporting from the Spokesman-Review. Administration officials have said some of the flagged enrollments involve “phantom enrollees,” people who are either unaware they were signed up or whose enrollments were fabricated by brokers.

Protect Our Care, a health care advocacy group, called the effort a “smokescreen.” President Brad Woodhouse said in a statement that the task force “is nothing more than a bullshit distraction, a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers’ money.” Woodhouse said the administration’s own numbers show 760,000 people will lose subsidy payments on the ACA marketplace, while roughly 850 brokers and agents previously suspected of fraud have been reinstated by the administration.

Woodhouse said Vance’s task force “won’t accomplish” the stated goal of reducing fraud and called it “a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered.”

House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee said in a written statement that “people losing healthcare isn’t a bug, it’s the plan,” referring to the administration’s broader health policy agenda.

Roughly 19 million people are currently enrolled in ACA marketplace plans nationwide. Protect Our Care says about 8 million people have lost coverage since the start of Trump’s second term, a decline the group attributes to an $800 billion cut to Medicaid and the administration’s failure to extend enhanced ACA subsidies that had lowered premiums for marketplace enrollees. Those enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025, and premiums have risen sharply for many remaining enrollees as a result.

The task force’s removals apply only to people the administration has determined, through its AI-assisted review, to be fraudulently enrolled or receiving improper subsidy payments. The administration has not released the full methodology used to make those determinations or said how enrollees who believe they were wrongly flagged can appeal.

The 419,000 enrollees flagged for further verification will remain on ACA rolls while the administration reviews their eligibility, according to the announcement. Officials did not give a timeline for when that review would be completed.