Trump administration boots 760K Americans off Obamacare and blames fraud

More than 760,000 people are being kicked off Obamacare in what Trump administration officials described Tuesday as a crackdown on fraudulent enrollments that's projected to save about $2.2 billion in federal subsidies.

Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, said during a news conference that those targeted include “a mix of both phantom people, but also real people who ​just don't meet the eligibility requirements,” Reuters reported.

Vance also said some people were unknowingly enrolled by insurance agents and brokers, with 569 facing suspension from the program.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said the government was imposing a six-month, “temporary national moratorium” on new Obamacare broker applications, saying agents were tied to most of the alleged fraud.

As of February, about 19.2 million people were receiving health insurance through Obamacare, an informal name for the program created by the Affordable Care Act signed into law by then-President Barack Obama, the Department of Health and Human Services said in June.

That number represented a 13 percent annual decline and followed the expiration of pandemic-era, enhanced premium tax credits, which resulted in steep increases in the cost of Obamacare policies, KFF reported at the time.

Tuesday's move marks one the most sweeping purges of Obamacare enrollees since the Trump administration began cracking down on alleged fraud in government programs last year, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on enforcement action.

Officials told the WSJ that the targets included people who were unaware they were enrolled in Obamacare, were ineligible because they have employer-sponsored health insurance or earn more than 400 percent above the federal poverty level, the WSJ said.

HHS guidelines for 2026 set that amount at $63,840 per individual or $132,000 for a family of four.

Trump has long opposed Obamacare and repeatedly promised to “repeal and replace” it during his successful 2016 presidential campaign.

But Trump’s efforts to repeal the program were famously thwarted when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona cast a dramatic thumbs-down vote around 1:30 a.m. on July 18, 2017, about 13 months before his death from brain cancer.

The Supreme Court has also rejected a series of legal challenges to Obamacare, including a ruling last year that preserved free, preventive health services for about 150 million people.