The Trump administration is planning to boot more than 700,000 people from their Affordable Care Act coverage as part of a purported initiative to root out fraud in the program—an effort that campaigners said is nothing more than a pretext to kick more people off healthcare.
Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the White House’s “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” announced the planned ACA purge during a press conference on Tuesday alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, whose agency has touted a right-wing think tank’s dubious claim that millions of ACA enrollees are on the program improperly.
Vance insisted during Tuesday’s press conference that the administration is putting itself “under an extraordinary burden of proof” to ensure its mass removal doesn’t impact people who are eligible for ACA coverage, but advocates were not convinced.
“Vance’s task force is a smokescreen for kicking people off coverage,” declared the advocacy group Protect Our Care. The organization’s president, Brad Woodhouse, said in a statement that Vance’s task force “is nothing more than a bullshit distraction—a political stunt designed to throw even more people off their coverage while pretending to save taxpayers’ money.”
“At a time when millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing skyrocketing costs, Vance and this administration are making the crisis exponentially worse,” said Woodhouse. “They are piling on more red tape, more confusion, and more opportunities for people to lose the coverage they rely on. Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick. Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that. It’s a smokescreen for an administration whose sole mission is to make it harder to get and stay covered but to shower billionaires with tax breaks instead.”
Millions of people have lost ACA and Medicaid coverage since the start of President Donald Trump’s second White House term, due in large part to a Republican budget law that cut Medicaid by more than $800 billion and did nothing to extend enhanced ACA subsidies, sending premiums soaring.
Trump administration officials have baselessly claimed that their anti-fraud efforts were the key driver of ACA enrollment declines this year.
