Vice President JD Vance Announces 750,000 People Removed From ACA Coverage

The Republican Party faces significant headwinds ahead of the upcoming midterms. So many decisions by the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress over the last year and a half have made life more expensive for the average American. In a strange move that doesn’t seem to address that issue at all, Vice President JD Vance announced that over 700,000 have lost their insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) due to alleged fraud. 

The New York Times reports that Vance announced this effort at a news conference intended to spotlight his anti-fraud task force. Vance said that the task force removed 750,000 “phantom people” from ACA insurance. “We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Vance said at a news conference on Tuesday. 

Vance added that the crackdown would save the government $2.2 billion, though, as we’ve learned with the Trump administration, they’ve got an interesting way of doing math. 

So how did the Trump administration find $2.2 billion in fraud?

From NPR:

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.

So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that some of these people lost their insurance because an email went to a spam folder or a call went straight to voicemail. Given that the Trump administration has a habit of using a sledgehammer when a scalpel would suffice, I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant chunk of the people who lost their insurance were eligible for it but didn’t realize they were at risk of losing it. 

Also, how is this not a war on the poor? One of the key targets of Vance’s anti-fraud task force was people who made under the federal poverty level and used insurance brokers to help. People below the federal poverty level aren’t allowed to register for ACA insurance, with the law originally intending for them to receive insurance through Medicare or Medicaid. After the Supreme Court ruled that states aren’t required to provide that option, these people may have no other way to get health insurance. 

As someone who receives insurance through the ACA, I can tell you right now that it went from a solid safety net to quite a burden. I went from paying $40 for a silver plan that provided great coverage for my needs to paying $189 for a bronze plan, which has significantly increased my out-of-pocket costs. 

I mean, millions of people have already lost their ACA insurance because they couldn’t afford it. The job market makes no sense; a quarter of Americans are functionally unemployed, and the jobs you can get often neither pay a livable wage nor provide benefits. So why the Trump administration thought “we’re gonna make even more poor people uninsured” was the move baffles me. 

Several Democrat politicians have already called out the cruelty of this move. “Using the false pretext of fighting fraud to strip Americans of their healthcare is as cynical as it is cruel,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) posted on social media.

“Families need coverage they can afford and count on when they get sick,” Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, a liberal-leaning advocacy group, told The Washington Post in a statement. “Vance’s task force won’t accomplish that.”

Canceling the health insurance of 760,000 people over allegations of fraud is kind of insane work ahead of the midterms, because those people can vote. If I were one of those people, and I saw the vice president bragging on TV about canceling my insurance, I’d be voting Blue all the way down the ballot. 

SEE ALSO:

Affordable Care Act Insurance Could Be 75% More Expensive Next Year

Double-Digit Increase In ACA Premiums Expected Next Year