'Sickening and Unacceptable': Anger Mounts as Trump and Vance Gleefully Rip Healthcare From 750,000

Anger and alarm are growing over the Trump administration's Tuesday announcement that it is removing at least 750,000 people from their Affordable Care Act coverage because they were "fraudulently" enrolled, a claim that drew deep skepticism from health policy experts and advocates.

Cynthia Cox, senior vice president at KFF, said fraud undoubtedly exists in the ACA marketplaces, noting that "some brokers have enrolled people without their knowledge or switched their plans so the broker could get a commission on the sale." But she warned that at least some of the hundreds of thousands of people targeted by the Trump administration "were likely legitimately enrolled."

Leading Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, announced the large-scale disenrollment during a celebratory press conference on Tuesday, proclaiming that the ACA purge would save American taxpayers $2.2 billion.

“Rather than addressing rising healthcare costs, the administration is forcing more Americans to become uninsured, live sicker, die younger, and risk being one emergency away from financial ruin," said Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Families USA. "People are uninsured because of this administration’s own aggressive policies to push and price people out of their health plans, making it harder to get on and stay on coverage."

Among the criteria the administration used to determine whether someone was fraudulently enrolled in the ACA, according to Oz, was if they had "never filed a claim." But health policy experts say it is hardly uncommon for healthy people to not use their insurance in a given year.

The Trump administration did not provide specific breakdowns of why the roughly 750,000 people were stripped of ACA coverage. Vance said during Tuesday's press conference that the federal government uncovered a "fraud ring" involving 40 brokerage agents who funneled around 50,000 people into market place coverage—but the vice president admitted that "some of those people were probably legitimate."

Oz and Vance insisted that the administration went to great lengths to contact those they suspected were enrolled without their knowledge or consent. The officials also said the administration was scrutinizing more than 400,000 additional ACA enrollees for purported fraud, potentially pushing the number of people removed from the program above 1 million.

Ailen Arreaza, executive director of ParentsTogether, said in a statement Tuesday that "while millions of families across the country struggle to afford groceries, housing, childcare, and healthcare, this administration is celebrating taking health coverage away from three-quarters of a million people."

"That tells us everything we need to know," Arreaza added.

Analysts estimate that around 10 million people have lost health insurance coverage since the start of President Donald Trump's term, due in large part a Republican budget package that slashed Medicaid by around $800 billion and did nothing to extend enhanced ACA subsidies, sending premiums soaring for millions of marketplace enrollees—and pricing many people out of coverage.

American voters have consistently ranked healthcare costs as a top concern heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Joel Payne, chief communications officer at MoveOn Political Action, said Tuesday that "just six weeks out from the election, the Trump administration continues to kick working Americans while they’re down."

"It is sickening and unacceptable for this administration to boot 750,000 Americans off their healthcare instead of focusing on lowering costs and ending the war in Iran," said Payne. "The American people and MoveOn members won't forget this betrayal when polls open in November."