White House ousts 760K from ACA, claiming fraud

What happened

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it had kicked 760,000 enrollees off the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace. Vice President JD Vance told a press conference that the canceled enrollees were a mix of “phantom people” and “real people who just don’t meet the eligibility requirements,” didn’t submit the proper documents or weren’t even aware they were enrolled in an ACA health plan.

Who said what

Tuesday’s announcement by the Vance-led anti-fraud task force “represents one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges” since the administration’s “crackdown on fraud began last year,” The Wall Street Journal said. There’s “widespread agreement that unauthorized enrollments should be canceled,” ACA expert Cynthia Cox at KFF said to The New York Times, but it’s not clear that “these were all indeed unauthorized enrollments,” and Vance’s panel didn’t appear to use the “appropriate process” to determine which to cancel.

What next?

Vance said his anti-fraud effort, including further scrutiny of up to 450,000 more enrollees and bans on about 600 ACA brokers, would save $2.2 billion. The “price of ACA insurance has skyrocketed” during Trump’s second term, prompting “millions to downgrade their plans or exit the program entirely,” The Associated Press said. “Early filings from insurers suggest that prices will increase substantially again next year,” the Times said.

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