Dr. Mehmet Oz and Vice President JD Vance held a press conference September 22 about "phantom patients." Yuri Gripas/Zuma
The Trump administration is removing about 760,000 people from Affordable Care Act coverage, Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz announced Tuesday, citing alleged fraud—and saying the people being kicked off their health care aren’t eligible, don’t know they have it, or simply don’t exist.
“We call them phantoms, because we believe most of them either don’t exist or had no idea they had coverage,” Oz said during a press conference first reported on by The Wall Street Journal.
“These are not real people. We’re not paying insurance for nonexistent ghosts,” Oz added. One of his justifications for that assertion is that the individuals being kicked off their health insurance have never filed a claim—that is, while they are insured, they’ve never actually gone to the doctor.
The idea of the “phantom patient” hoarding Affordable Care Act cash is a persistent one in GOP rhetoric. The Paragon Health Institute, a Republican think tank, has for years pushed the idea that all patients who don’t use their coverage—exactly the kind of patients insurers want!—must necessarily be fraudulent “phantom” enrollees. But as Cynthia Cox of the health policy research group KFF said in 2025, the real story is more complicated.
“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 said at the time. “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.” Younger and healthier people, in particular, are more likely than others to acquire health insurance—especially if they’re able to access cheap plans—and then not actually use it unless they need to, which they very well might not.
The universal health care advocacy group Protect Our Care called Vance and Oz’s health care fraud task force a “smokescreen” for a push to cull actual coverage from actual people.
“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,” said Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse. “At a time when millions of Americans are already losing coverage and facing skyrocketing costs, Vance and this administration are making the crisis exponentially worse.”
