‘The fact that we have 23 million makes me think we have too many participants’ in the health care program, he said in a recent interview.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said that enrollment for Obamacare programs may be “too high” and signaled that some people should not be enrolled.
During an interview with NBC News published on Monday, Oz said some people on Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, plans shouldn’t be enrolled in the program.
“In fact, the fact that we have 23 million makes me think we have too many participants in the ACA,” Oz told the media outlet. “It’s too high of a number.”
Some people are enrolled in the ACA through either fraud or via a mistake in the sign-up process, he said. And some may have chosen an ACA plan rather than sign up for Medicaid or receive health insurance coverage through their job.
“Either their income would not qualify them, they made too much or made too little, or they didn’t file the forms, maybe on purpose, or they were duplicately enrolled in Medicaid or more likely other states’ ACAs,” he said. “These are major concerns for us.”
The CMS said in a statement in early 2025 that around 4 million to 5 million people were enrolled with taxpayer-subsidized ACA coverage in an improper manner in 2024, costing as much as $20 billion.
The agency stated at the time that it would “take decisive action to root out these improper enrollments” from Obamacare marketplaces, adding that such “actions will reduce improper federal spending on advance payments of the premium tax credit by $11 billion to $14 billion in 2027.”
Aside from the CMS finding, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a draft report on fraud in the ACA in December 2025 and found that deceased people and individuals with fake identities have received Obamacare coverage.
Its preliminary analysis for data in 2023 showed there were more than 58,000 Social Security numbers that received the Advance Premium Tax Credit (APTC), a federal subsidy that lowers enrollees’ monthly insurance premiums, which also matched Social Security Administration death data. That amounts to around 0.42 percent of Social Security numbers that received APTC for the year, it stated.
“Although CMS has processes to review death data during enrollment, the agency does not periodically review death data for all federal Marketplace enrollees,” the report reads.
