Melody Schreiber, reporting for The Guardian:

The Trump administration is removing 760,000 people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace on allegations of fraud, officials said on Tuesday – adding to previous efforts to chip away at federally subsidized insurance programs and likely causing some of the lowest-income Americans to forego healthcare, experts said.

The US government is also investigating about 420,000 people whom they suspect of fraud, and they are putting a six-month enrollment moratorium on new agents and brokers selling Obamacare policies, officials said at a press conference.

The removed enrollees are a mixture of “phantoms” and “ghosts” as well as people who don’t meet the eligibility requirements of Obamacare, said Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“These are not real people,” he said, claiming that expelling them from the ACA marketplace would save the federal government $2.2bn.

I’ll grant the potential for fraud here (though the CMS press release and fact sheet provide scant details). I’ll even let the “not real people” comment slide as a rhetorical explanation for the purported fake enrollments.

But this:

About 35% of ACA enrollees have never used their health insurance, Oz said. “That’s just not possible,” he said, adding, “So we know there is fraud.”

Oz—the head of a federal health insurance agency—clearly has no idea how insurance works. Healthy people who pay for and don’t use health insurance help spread the risk and costs of insurance coverage across a larger pool. Many healthy people pay for health insurance as a hedge against emergencies because the astronomical medical costs could otherwise bankrupt them. In some states, you’re required to carry medical insurance, regardless of your health. Some people refuse medical service because they can’t afford the after-insurance cost of care. Insurance companies count on a subset of people who dutifully pay their premiums and use little or no healthcare. Asserting fraud from non-use is logically flawed at best and actively deceitful at worst. Not only is it possible to have insurance and not use it, it’s literally the business model.

From the top down, this entire administration is filled with incompetent, clueless clowns.