Some of them were real people who never should have qualified. Some of them, according to Vice President JD Vance, may not have been people at all.
Either way, taxpayers were covering their health insurance.
Vance’s fraud task force is cutting more than 760,000 people from Obamacare coverage after federal officials flagged hundreds of thousands of enrollments as unauthorized or potentially fraudulent. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) canceled about 315,000 enrollments in all, and says the move should recover roughly $2.2 billion in subsidies.
Vance described the group as a mix of “phantom people” and real people who didn’t meet the rules. Some, he said, were allegedly signed up by brokers without ever knowing it.
That’s the part worth sitting with. A stranger puts your name on a government health plan, collects the commission, and the bill goes to everyone else.
Vance pointed to one alleged scheme involving 40 brokerage agents and about 50,000 enrollments. Many of those enrollees, he said, were ineligible. Some may never have existed.
And the review isn’t finished. Another 419,000 to 450,000 people now face additional checks on immigration status and income.
“We’re going to make sure that they are, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all, we’re going to make sure that they actually meet the income threshold requirements,” Vance said.
CMS is going after the middlemen, too. The agency has sent termination notices to more than 200 agents and brokers this year. Another 569 received notices of intent to terminate, accused of submitting applications missing basic identifying information, including Social Security numbers.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the agency found unusually large numbers of enrollees with no Social Security number at all, and questioned whether some of those accounts belonged to real or properly enrolled customers.
The numbers tell the story. The administration expects to get back $2.2 billion. CMS says that left alone, unauthorized Marketplace enrollments could have driven as much as $6.6 billion in improper federal spending in 2026 alone.
That’s a lot of money for people who may not be there.
