You’d think even a guy as politically tone deaf as J.D. Vance would be savvy enough to know that it might be a bad idea to toss more than 750,000 people off health insurance just a few weeks before a midterm election when affordability is already a big problem for the GOP.

But that is exactly what J.D. Vance did on Tuesday. Sure, he claimed to be acting in the name of fraud and saving money. It’s the same excuse the Trump administration used for withholding billions in Medicaid funding from Minnesota and California, The New York Times pointed out.

Even worse, Vance is hinting that 419,000 more will be subjected to “additional verification,” likely with the help of one or more of his tech edgelords’ AI.

Vance announced the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) purge during a press conference that also included Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services “has touted a right-wing think tank’s dubious claim that millions of ACA enrollees are on the program improperly,” Common Dreams noted.

One of Oz’s pretexts is the allegation that enrollees who never make claims are indicative of fraud. KFF Health News debunked that fear mongering last year. Among other reasons, “It’s not uncommon for healthy people in an insurance marketplace not to use their insurance in a given year, according to health policy experts,” KFF Health said. “Enrollment data shows that it made the marketplace population younger, and younger enrollees may be less likely to use their insurance.”

Younger enrollees are also better for any insurer. As C&L’s Karoli Kuns summed it up in a behind-the-scenes message, “Basically they're booting the best insureds off the ACA indiscriminately either because they're stupid or because it'll undermine the risk pools.”

It speaks volumes that any presidential administration would put a doctor eager to kick people off their health insurance in charge of any health insurance program. But doing so under suspicious pretenses is beyond the pale.

“Vance insisted during Tuesday’s press conference that the administration is putting itself ‘under an extraordinary burden of proof’ to ensure its mass removal doesn’t impact people who are eligible for ACA coverage, but advocates were not convinced,” Common Dreams said.

Advocates have good reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, millions of people have already lost ACA and Medicaid coverage during the “pro-life” Trump administration. Medicaid was cut by more than $800 billion thanks to the Trump and Republicans’ budget bill that gave tax breaks to billionaires and also failed to extend enhanced ACA subsidies, as per Common Dreams.

As ACA premiums soared, the Trump administration “baselessly claimed that their anti-fraud efforts were the key driver of ACA enrollment declines this year,” Common Dreams also noted.

For a deeper dive into what's terribly wrong with this latest ploy to rob Americans of health care, check out Charles Gaba's expert analysis.

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