Addressing fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare has been a major focus of the Trump Administration, particularly with the creation of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Last week, the task force took a rather aggressive tactic, announcing that it will cancel 315,000 unauthorized enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals in the Marketplace. The move, however, is being criticized by many in the medical industry.
The administration anticipates that this will return about $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.
“We are shutting down unauthorized Marketplace enrollments and returning approximately $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in a statement. “CMS is strengthening safeguards, pursuing bad actors, and holding agents and brokers accountable when they break the rules. Under President Trump, HHS will protect Americans’ health coverage and ensure taxpayer dollars reach the people they are intended to serve.”
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One healthcare expert argued that while there’s a need to address fraud in the Marketplace, patients shouldn’t be the ones punished.
“I agree we have to be going after bad actors, but we can’t be going after the patients,” said Dr. Adam Brown, an emergency physician and founder of ABIG Health.
Brown emphasized that these efforts can’t be looked at in isolation. The enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025, increasing premiums for many Marketplace enrollees. In addition, the Trump administration is implementing Medicaid work requirements that states generally must begin by 2027.
“If you look at these things in isolation, you have a tendency to anchor to, ‘Well, that’s not a lot of people,’ or ‘I’m sure a lot of those individuals that are within that 760,000 number are not real individuals,’” Brown said. “But that all said, when you kind of look at all of these pieces of the puzzle, it makes me question: Are we trying to dismantle some of the important social service safety net type of programs in the country that so many people depend on, without a very clear alternative right now that’s affordable that gives them the necessary access?”
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Brown urged CMS to establish a formal process for reinstating people who were wrongly disenrolled. He also called on Congress to extend the ACA tax credits.
Families USA, a patient advocacy organization, also spoke out against the decision.
“Once again, the Trump administration is using alleged fraud accusations as a political smokescreen to double down on what they are actually doing: taking health coverage away from hundreds of thousands of people,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA. “Real fraud should be stopped, especially dishonest brokers who sign people up without their knowledge. Previously, anti-fraud policies and procedures banned those brokers, but this administration reinstated them. Now families, not bad actors, are paying the price.”
This comes as recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the broader implementation of the ACA was associated with an estimated 20% to 30% reduction in mortality among people who were uninsured before the law.
With the administration’s decision to remove 760,000 people from ACA coverage, it’s important to note that not all of those people will become uninsured, noted one of the paper’s authors, Robert Kaestner, research associate at the University of Chicago.
“The majority of them are going to have access to other types of health insurance… So 250,000 people who might end up uninsured out of a country of 333 million — that’s not a big change, but still, it’s 250,000 people potentially without health insurance. That’s a very serious consequence,” Kaestner estimated.
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