JD Vance Is Coming For Your Obamacare

Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz announced on Tuesday that around 760,000 people would be removed from Affordable Care Act coverage. They cited alleged fraud and claimed that these individuals were not eligible, were unaware of their coverage, or simply did not exist. Oz stated, "These are not real people.

We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts," according to The Wall Street Journal. One justification for this assertion is that the individuals being removed have never filed a claim, meaning they had coverage but never actually used it. This "phantom patient" concept is a common theme in Republican rhetoric, as the Paragon Health Institute, a GOP think tank, has long argued that patients who don't use their coverage must be fraudulent "phantom" enrollees.

However, Cynthia Cox of the health policy research group KFF suggests that the real issue is more nuanced. "We’re not trying to argue there is no fraud. It's a real thing. But the question is, how big of a scale is this problem?" Cox noted. "Just suggesting that anyone who's not using health care is a fraudulent enrollee—that's not true.

Plenty of people don't use health care." Protect Our Care, a universal health care advocacy group, called Vance and Oz's health care fraud task force a "smokescreen" for a push to remove actual coverage from actual people. Brad Woodhouse, the group's president, stated, "This so-called 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."

As millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing rising costs, Protect Our Care argues that Vance and this administration are making the crisis worse.