WASHINGTON — The White House is working with Senate leadership to get health care fraud legislation over the finish line before the end of the congressional session, Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday during an announcement about cracking down on health care fraud.

As part of that announcement, Vance said the Trump administration has removed about 760,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges identified as either “phantom” enrollees or people who are ineligible.

“We’re actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them,” Vance, who leads the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, said at the news conference. “Amazingly, we weren’t doing that before.”

So-called phantom enrollees are those registered for an ACA health plan but do not generate any medical claims, often because they are unaware they’re enrolled, are already covered by another policy or aren’t real people.

The purge of ACA enrollees is part of a broader GOP effort to crack down on fraud in public health care programs.

The White House has been communicating with congressional Republicans, including Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., about possible legislation. Vance said that while the House has been more focused on the issue, he hopes the Senate will act before the end of the current 119th Congress.

“I think we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “There are some pieces of legislation that we think could be codified by the end of the term, meaning the end of the Senate term, so we’re going to keep on working with them.”

Schmitt led an effort earlier this summer to investigate Medicaid fraud in Maine, finding issues with use of electronic visit verification, a system to verify that in-home care services are being provided by caregivers. Ernst sponsors a package that includes a slate of provisions aimed at cracking down on fraud in federal programs, including ways to identify fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz said at the event that the ACA was originally intended to be a bridge for people to access health care before they ultimately find insurance through their employers. Removing enrollees is meant to clean up the program and ensure the people who have ACA insurance actually need it, he said.

“It is hard to enforce an organization crafted so that law enforcement itself struggles to find out whether or not they can keep up with these massive fraud schemes,” Oz said.

GOP lawmakers in the House, meanwhile, have spent a fair bit of legislative time on health care fraud in recent months.

The House in July passed a bill that would allow the secretary of Labor to suspend payments to medical providers convicted of fraud. It passed another that seeks to bolster information-sharing services between law enforcement and state agencies to root out fraud.

The effort also comes ahead of the midterms this November, where health care affordability has been a major issue for both parties. House Democrats have indicated that they plan to restore ACA enhanced premium tax credits that expired at the end of last year if they take control of the chamber after the midterms.

Polling has shown that voters on the whole think it’s important for lawmakers to address health care fraud, but they view rising health costs as a bigger issue.

Vance called on congressional Democrats to work with the GOP on the issue of health care fraud, but they’re unlikely to be amenable. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the announcement about the purge of enrollees in a statement on the social platform X on Tuesday, saying that Democrats plan to expand health coverage if they win back the Senate in November.

“As health care costs skyrocket and millions of Americans go uninsured, what is JD Vance and Donald Trump’s solution? Kick hundreds of thousands more people off their health insurance,” he said. “Senate Democrats will expand coverage and lower costs for millions of Americans when we take back the majority.”

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