Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force is preparing to remove more than half a million Americans from their Obamacare health insurance plans, according to a new report, in what would mark the biggest crackdown on the program’s insurance exchange since President Donald Trump’s administration launched its fight against fraud last year.
The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which Vance leads, is targeting 760,000 Affordable Care Act accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to the task force, those accounts belong either to people who do not actually meet the program’s eligibility requirements or to people who do not exist at all.
The task force said that cutting off subsidies for the allegedly fraudulent enrollees would save taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion.
The effort is not limited to enrollees. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is headed by administrator Mehmet Oz, was also expected to cut ties with hundreds of brokers and agents, according to The Journal. Those brokers and agents are paid each time they sign up a new enrollee for government health insurance.
Officials said just 40 insurance agents and brokers were responsible for creating 50,000 fake accounts, costing $45 million. CMS has already removed 66 agents from its system, and the agency intends to remove another 469 agents, according to the report.
The crackdown comes after enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance program exploded under former President Joe Biden. During the Biden administration, enrollment more than doubled, climbing from roughly 10 million to a whopping 22 million.
Under the new approach, the agency also plans to take immigration status into account as part of its assessments, according to the report.
In addition, CMS intends to end a Biden-era policy that allowed enrollees to keep receiving subsidies every month even after they failed to provide documentation proving who they were and that they were eligible for the program, The Journal reported.
Taken together, the moves represent a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to root out fraud in Obamacare, targeting not only the hundreds of thousands of accounts the task force says should not be receiving taxpayer-funded subsidies, but also the agents and brokers officials say helped create fake accounts in the first place.
The planned removal of 760,000 accounts would be the largest purge of the exchange since the administration began its anti-fraud push last year, according to The Journal, and the task force’s $2.2 billion savings estimate underscores the scale of taxpayer money officials say is at stake.
With CMS already removing dozens of agents and preparing to drop hundreds more, and with new requirements tied to documentation and immigration status on the way, the administration is signaling that the era of subsidies flowing without verification is coming to an end.
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