HHS cancels health insurance of 760,000 individuals enrolled in healthcare.gov plans : NPR

The Department of Health and Human Services announced something it’s never done before – canceled the health insurance of 760,000 individuals enrolled in plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it had done something it has never done before. It canceled the health insurance of 760,000 people enrolled in plans in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace, also known as healthcare.gov. NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin is here to tell us more. Hi.

SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.

SUMMERS: So, Selena, I understand that Vice President JD Vance held a press conference today.

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, that’s right. It was under the auspice of the White House anti-fraud task force led by Vance. He was talking about the federal health insurance marketplace, also known as Obamacare, and just as a reminder, this is for people who don’t get insurance from their job or a public program like Medicare or Medicaid. They can go on healthcare.gov and buy a private health insurance plan, oftentimes with premium subsidies paid for by the federal government. So today, Vice President Vance said that fraudster brokers were signing up, quote, “phantom people” into these plans. Here’s Vance.

(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)

JD VANCE: You have a system where, on the one hand, brokers are paid money to feed patients into the system, while on the other hand, the government isn’t even checking whether the people enrolled are actually eligible for the program. What do you have? – of course, rampant, rampant fraud.

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: So he put the blame on brokers for committing the fraud and announced moves to punish them, like stopping new brokers from registering for the upcoming open enrollment and changing enrollment processes. He said the government would save more than $2 billion in subsidies they would have been sending to insurance companies for those enrollments that they canceled.

SUMMERS: Interesting. So did the officials explain their process for identifying these enrollments as fraudulent?

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Not in a lot of detail, no. But Cynthia Cox, who’s the director of the program on the Affordable Care Act at KFF, which is a nonpartisan health research organization, filled in some details with her understanding of how this unfolded.

CYNTHIA COX: What we know is that the administration sent a list of about a million people to health insurance companies and asked these health insurance companies to try to make contact with those people. And if those people did not respond within 30 days, they ultimately had their plan canceled.

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She says there is fraud in the Marketplace, but it is also entirely possible that qualified people had their health insurance canceled here. They might not have replied to the notice in time.

COX: People move. People have – you know, they don’t check their email or their voicemail or, you know, that sort of thing.

SUMMERS: Selena, what did Vance say about that possibility?

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: In the press conference, he and other Trump administration officials were asked that question a few times and essentially said they were confident that these were, quote, “phantom enrollees.” They said they tried to get in touch with them in a variety of ways, but if they didn’t answer, and if they hadn’t filed a claim, their enrollment was canceled. And they also said they were looking at 400,000 more enrollees who might get their plans canceled. Sources I spoke with today said there just needs to be more transparency about exactly how they’re making sure not to cancel people’s legitimate plans.

SUMMERS: I mean, Selena, as you know, the midterms are just around the corner, and historically, health insurance has been a really big election issue. How’s that fit in here?

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, I mean, Republicans like to campaign on fighting fraud and on the failures of Obamacare, so this hits on both of those priorities. But health insurance also taps into the affordability issues that voters have been talking about a lot lately, and that cuts against Republicans. Millions of people really did lose their health insurance this year. I’ve spoken to many of them. Some couldn’t afford their premiums anymore. Some have lost their Medicaid coverage, and this problem is only going to get worse in the coming year. Premiums are rising again. There are new work requirements in Medicaid that are projected to mean millions more people becoming uninsured, and that’s because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Republicans passed last year.

SUMMERS: NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin, thank you.

SIMMONS-DUFFIN: You’re welcome.

Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.