The Trump administration is eliminating approximately 760,000 Obamacare enrollments

An Obamacare sign is placed outside an insurance agency in Miami on November 12, 2025.

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Tuesday that it canceled about 315,000 enrollments in the Affordable Care Act marketplace for about 760,000 people last month, saying they were unauthorized enrollments that Vice President JD Vance called “rampant fraud.”

According to a CMS notice, the enforcement action also includes screening approximately 419,000 people to ensure that they are legal residents of the U.S. and meet the income threshold requirements to receive benefits from the ACA’s public exchanges, also known as Obamacare.

The White House Vice Presidential Fraud Elimination Task Force led the cancellations and estimates the action will save about $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies. At a briefing on Tuesday, Vance accused the Biden administration of maintaining a system that enabled fraud.

“You have a system where, on one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system, while on the other hand, the government doesn’t even check whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program. What do you have? Of course, rampant, rampant fraud,” Vance said.

It’s unclear how many of those 315,000 sign-ups involved people who weren’t eligible for coverage, or whether the Biden administration hadn’t actually verified that they were able to sign up. The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration has made broad allegations of fraud in U.S. health care programs and limited funding and eligibility for the federal Medicaid program.

During Tuesday’s briefing, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz that about 35% of people currently in the Obamacare system “have never used the program.” He said these people never took a prescription or saw a doctor.

Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz (center) speaks alongside U.S. Vice President JD Vance (center) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson (center) during a press conference on fraud on September 22, 2026 in Washington, DC

Kent Nishimura | Afp | Getty Images

The law establishes an individual mandate or requirement that most people have insurance, in part because healthier people who require less care in the patient pool will make the system more affordable. However, as of 2019, the federal penalty for not having coverage is $0.

Obamacare plans, created by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, offer subsidies based on household size and estimated annual income. President Donald Trump failed to repeal the law in his first term but has proposed changes that would make these insurance plans less comprehensive.

Oz argued that during the Covid-19 pandemic, when federal spending increased dramatically, bad actors were attracted to the ACA market subsidies. He pointed to a surge in enrollment from about 10 million people before the pandemic to about 22 million after it, arguing that weakened protections and lack of enforcement by the Biden administration contributed to inappropriate enrollments.

Obamacare plans experienced “an unprecedented increase in enrollment from 2021 to 2024,” said a June report from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the principal adviser to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on policy development. The report said of this registration: “Nearly half…were suspected of being inappropriate, fake or fraudulent.” The report defined improper or fraudulent enrollment as people who misrepresent their income to gain access to free plans.

The increase in enrollment came after the American Rescue Plan, a law passed in 2021 to combat Covid-19, increased available subsidies to make health care more affordable during the crisis. These broader loans were extended but later expired at the end of 2025, resulting in higher premiums for many loans covered by ACA exchanges.

An estimated 19.2 million Americans are currently enrolled in Obamacare plans, according to the report.