CMS Canceled 315,000 Marketplace Policies: What to Check Before Open Enrollment

On August 31, 2026, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services canceled roughly 315,000 Marketplace policies covering more than 760,000 people. The public announcement came three weeks later, on September 22, alongside an estimate that the cancellations will return about $2.2 billion in federal premium subsidies. CMS says every one of those policies was an enrollment the person never made — and that more cancellations are likely.

If you buy your own health coverage through HealthCare.gov, this matters to you in both directions. It is a reminder to check your account before the 2027 open enrollment window opens on November 1 — because someone else may have enrolled you, or changed your plan, without your knowledge. And if your legitimate coverage was caught up in the sweep by mistake, you have specific ways to get it back.

What CMS says happened

For years, some insurance agents and brokers have been enrolling people in Marketplace plans — or switching their existing plans — without the person’s consent. The motive is commissions: the subsidy and the premium flow to the insurer, so a person who never agreed to anything may never see a bill and never notice. CMS says it has now canceled “approximately 315,000 enrollments covering over 760,000 individuals after confirmation that these enrollments were unauthorized.”

Not every cancellation was a random sweep. According to the interim final rule CMS published with the announcement, the canceled 2026 policies shared a specific pattern: they were enrolled with agent or broker assistance, lacked verified citizenship or immigration documentation, had no identifiable insurance claims, and the insurers could not establish contact with the consumer.

The scale of the underlying problem is documented in a July 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office. Consumer complaints tied to confirmed unauthorized enrollments and plan switches on the federal platform grew more than fourfold from 2023 through 2025, reaching 299,604 in 2025. GAO also found that at least 160,000 Marketplace applications in plan year 2024 had likely unauthorized changes, and that CMS’s consent procedures were not always used and did not reliably verify the consumer’s identity. In GAO’s earlier undercover testing, most fictitious applicants its investigators created were approved for subsidized coverage.

Two honest caveats

CMS states the cancellations were confirmed as unauthorized, and the pattern above explains why a no-claims, unreachable, broker-assisted enrollment looks like a phantom. But critics — including analysts writing in Health Affairs — have pressed CMS to explain more about how individual cases were decided, and have warned that some people who genuinely wanted their coverage could lose it in a mass administrative action. For one Marketplace insurer, the disenrollments represented 8 to 10 percent of its total membership, by Health Affairs’ count. CMS also said in September that about 419,000 more enrollees would go through additional verification, with a focus on immigration status and income — a step that could surface more cancellations. (The figure comes from administration remarks on the announcement, as reported by Health Affairs.)

One scope line matters: the cancellations and the verification push apply to the federal marketplace — HealthCare.gov and the states that run on its platform. People enrolled through a marketplace their own state operates are not part of this action.

If your coverage disappeared and you believe it shouldn’t have, the fix section below applies to you. Don’t assume a cancellation letter must be correct, and don’t ignore one either.

What changes for 2027

Three things, all aimed at the enrollment pipeline rather than at consumers:

• A pause on new brokers. An interim final rule, effective September 22, 2026, blocks agents and brokers who do not already hold a 2026 Exchange agreement from registering to sell federal Marketplace plans for 2027. The moratorium runs through February 1, 2027 unless CMS ends or extends it. It applies to HealthCare.gov and the state exchanges that use the federal platform; states that run their own exchanges are unaffected. CMS is taking comments on the rule through November 21, 2026. The agency’s data show agents who first registered in 2026 were about three times more likely to be noncompliant than longer-tenured peers, and accounted for a disproportionate share of the problem.
• Tighter verification. All applications involving an agent or broker must now include a Social Security number or verifiable immigration document numbers for every applicant. Consumers must give electronic authorization before an agent can act on their application, and existing agents and brokers must re-verify their identities through Login.gov or ID.me.
• Enforcement against brokers. CMS has issued termination notices to more than 200 noncompliant agents and brokers since January 2026, and sent 569 notices of intent to terminate over 2026 applications submitted without key applicant information. The response windows for the first 100 have closed, and 66 of them have been terminated so far.

What to check before November 1

Open enrollment for 2027 coverage runs November 1, 2026 – January 15, 2027 on HealthCare.gov, with December 15 the deadline for a January 1 start. Before it opens, log in to your HealthCare.gov account and confirm:

1. The plan listed is the plan you chose — including the insurer’s name.
2. The agent or broker of record is someone you actually worked with. An unfamiliar name is the single clearest red flag.
3. The income and household information on your application is yours. Inflated income figures are how subsidy-driven fraud is made to look eligible.
4. Your prior-year Form 1095-A looks right. It is in the tax forms section of your account. A plan on it you never had means someone enrolled you.
5. Your mail and your doctors. An insurance card, bill, or cancellation notice from a company you never contacted — or a pharmacy suddenly rejecting your coverage — are the real-world ways people discover this.

Taking a screenshot of your plan, premium, subsidy, and agent details before November 1 gives you a before-and-after record if anything changes during open enrollment.

If you find an enrollment you didn’t make

CMS’s own process, described in the interim final rule, runs through one place: the Marketplace Call Center at 1-800-318-2596 (TTY 1-855-889-4325), open around the clock except holidays. Call to report the unauthorized enrollment, cancel the coverage, and ask what happens next. If the enrollment was made in your name, ask the Marketplace to void or zero out the Form 1095-A so your tax return doesn’t reconcile subsidies you never received.

If your Social Security number was used without your consent, you can also file a report at IdentityTheft.gov, the Federal Trade Commission’s identity-theft site. Keep copies of any notices, note the dates you discovered the problem, and write down the names of any agents or companies involved.

The tax part, which is the part that can hurt

Subsidies for Marketplace plans are advanced premium tax credits (APTC). If a plan was created in your name, the IRS may expect you to reconcile those credits on your return using Form 8962. Two things make this sharper than it used to be:

• Under the 2025 tax legislation (P.L. 119-21), the cap on how much excess APTC must be repaid was eliminated. A person enrolled for a full year without their knowledge could face a repayment on the order of $8,000 or more — CMS’s rulemaking uses the $674 average monthly subsidy for HealthCare.gov consumers to make exactly that point.
• Failing to file Form 8962 to reconcile an unauthorized enrollment’s credits can cause the IRS to hold your refund or start collection through the Treasury Offset Program.

This is why the voided 1095-A matters: with a corrected or zeroed-out form, the credits should not be counted against you. Deal with it well before the filing season, not when the IRS flags a rejected return.

If your real coverage was canceled by mistake

Losing coverage involuntarily triggers a special enrollment period, generally 60 days from the loss, so you can re-enroll outside the open enrollment window — and the 2027 window itself starts November 1. Call the Marketplace Call Center to report the error and your insurer to confirm what happened. If you have appointments or prescriptions coming up, confirm your coverage status before you arrive rather than at the counter. Our ACA Marketplace basics guide explains how the special enrollment period and the subsidy rules work; the 2027 subsidy cliff matters when you compare plans this fall.

One fraud warning worth repeating

Big enforcement news brings out look-alike scammers. The same tricks that fueled the original fraud are still circulating — social media ads promising cash, gifts, or oversized subsidies if you hand over personal details. Real Marketplace subsidies go to your insurer to lower your premium; nobody pays them directly to you. CMS will not call to demand a fee to reinstate coverage, and no legitimate helper needs your bank details to “process” a cancellation. If someone contacts you about this story, hang up and start from the call center number above or from HealthCare.gov itself.

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This article reflects the actions CMS announced in September 2026 and the related federal rulemaking; details such as verification counts and termination figures may continue to change as the effort proceeds through the 2027 open enrollment period.