An Obamacare sign hangs outside an insurance agency in Miami on November 12, 2025.
Joe Radle | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday that it canceled about 315,000 Affordable Care Act marketplace enrollments covering about 760,000 people last month, alleging fraudulent enrollments that Vice President J.D. Vance characterized as “rampant fraud.”
The enforcement action also includes verification to ensure that approximately 419,000 people are legal U.S. residents and meet the income threshold requirements to receive benefits from the ACA’s public exchanges, also known as Obamacare, according to a CMS release.
The vice president’s White House Task Force to Combat Fraud is leading the cancellation, which estimates the move will save taxpayers about $2.2 billion in aid. In a briefing Tuesday, Vance accused the Biden administration of maintaining a system that enables fraud.
“We have a system where brokers are paid to bring patients into the system, and the government doesn’t even check to see if those enrolling are actually eligible for the program. What do you have? Of course, it’s rampant fraud,” Vance said.
It’s unclear how many of those 315,000 enrollments involved people who were ineligible for coverage, or whether the Biden administration hadn’t actually made sure they were eligible for coverage. The move comes amid widespread accusations by the Trump administration of fraud in U.S. health care programs and funding and eligibility restrictions for federal and state Medicaid programs.
At Tuesday’s briefing, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz claimed that about 35% of people currently enrolled in the Obamacare system “have never used the program.” He said these people had never used a prescription or seen a doctor.
Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz (center) speaks alongside U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (left) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson (right) during a news conference on fraud in Washington, DC, September 22, 2026.
Kent Nishimura | AFP | Getty Images
This law has a separate obligation, or requirement, for most people to have insurance. One reason for this is that the patient pool includes healthy people who require less medical care, making the system more affordable. However, starting in 2019, the federal penalty for not having insurance is $0.
The Obamacare plan, created by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, provides subsidies based on household size and estimated annual income. President Donald Trump was unable to overturn the bill during his first term, but he has proposed amendments that would make these plans less comprehensive.
Mr. Oz argued that bad actors were drawn to the ACA market subsidies during the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal spending skyrocketed dramatically. He pointed to an increase in enrollment from about 10 million people before the pandemic to about 22 million people after the pandemic, and argued that weakened safeguards and lack of enforcement by the Biden administration contributed to inadequate registration.
The Obamacare plan experienced “unprecedented enrollment growth from 2021 to 2024,” according to a June report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the secretary of Health and Human Services’ chief advisor on policy development. The report said “nearly half of the registrations…are suspected of being inappropriate, fictitious or fraudulent”. The report defines improper or fraudulent enrollment as when an individual misrepresents their income to access a free plan.
The surge in enrollment comes after the American Rescue Plan, the coronavirus relief bill passed in 2021, increased subsidies available to make health care more affordable during the crisis. These broader credits were extended but then expired at the end of 2025, increasing premiums for many covered by the ACA exchanges.
An estimated 19.2 million Americans are currently enrolled in Obamacare plans, according to the report.
