CMS Cancels 315,000 Obamacare Plans Covering 760,000 Over Citizenship Gaps and Suspect Enrollments

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said Tuesday it canceled 315,000 Affordable Care Act health plans last month covering about 760,000 people, citing unverified citizenship or immigration documents and suspected improper enrollments.

The figures were disclosed in rulemaking documents published in the Federal Register. CMS also said it will bar some 569 brokers who submitted “statistically implausible rates of plan year 2026 applications” that omitted basic applicant information, including Social Security numbers.

The agency is imposing an immediate freeze on new Obamacare broker registrations through Feb. 1, 2027. Officials said the freeze uses an emergency-style process that skips the usual advance notice-and-comment period.

Vice President JD Vance’s antifraud task force oversaw the cancellations, according to reporting on the Federal Register package. Administration officials put the taxpayer savings from last month’s cancellations at about $2.2 billion. CMS said unauthorized enrollments could produce up to $6.6 billion in improper federal spending for the 2026 plan year.

The agency described a pattern that is now familiar to anyone who followed the 2024–2025 marketplace complaints: brokers and agents enrolling people without genuine consent, switching plans without permission, using inaccurate information, or filing questionable applications to collect commissions. Those practices, CMS said, produce improper premium-tax-credit payments, surprise coverage changes, medical-bill fights, and tax problems for the people whose names were used.

An HHS report released earlier this year estimated that nearly half of new Obamacare enrollments between 2021 and 2024 may have been improper, phantom, or fraudulent. More than 1 million enrollees received coverage without providing a Social Security number, that report said.

Mychal Walker, president of the National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals, objected to the registration freeze. “A blanket moratorium on new agent and broker registrations would punish legitimate professionals instead of targeting the bad actors responsible for fraud,” he said.

The cancellations sit inside a wider Vance-Oz cleanup of federal health programs. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has already imposed moratoriums on new hospice and home-health enrollments and suspended payments to agencies in high-fraud markets. Vance has used the task force on the midterm trail as evidence that the administration is clawing back money that left the Treasury during the Biden-era expansion of zero-premium plans.

Citizenship and immigration documentation are not a side issue in the new cancellations. CMS said plans were dropped when files could not verify that the enrollee was eligible on those grounds. That is the same eligibility question the administration has pressed in public-charge rules, Medicaid work and verification changes, and the Justice Department’s noncitizen-voting docket.

Democrats and health-industry groups have framed marketplace losses this year as the result of expired COVID-era subsidy enhancements. The Tuesday package is a different claim: that a large share of the rolls should not have been there in the first place, and that brokers who filed incomplete or implausible applications will be cut off from the system that paid them.

The freeze runs through Feb. 1, 2027. The 569 brokers CMS intends to bar have not yet been named in the public summary. The 315,000 canceled plans are already off the books.