Dr. Mehmet Oz Says Obamacare Enrollment Numbers Are ‘Too High’

‘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.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz speaks during an event in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Oct. 16, 2025. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

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.

In a separate news release about the report, GAO said it found “at least 30,000 applications in plan year 2023 and at least 160,000 applications in plan year 2024” that may have had “unauthorized changes by agents or brokers” that could result in harm to consumers, such as a “loss of access to medications.”

Oz, a daytime television personality for years who is best known as “Dr. Oz,” has said he wants to root out what the administration says is fraud, abuse, and waste in the government, saying that communities in Minnesota and California have been linked to widespread health care fraud.

Speaking with The Epoch Times’ Jan Jekielek earlier this year, Oz said, “What we’re seeing in Minnesota is the tip of the iceberg, because it is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care.”

The Medicare agency that Oz heads will also audit Minnesota amid allegations of fraud in the state, he also told Fox News in January.

According to data from CMS released in late January, some 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage since the start of the open enrollment period for the program that began on Nov. 1, 2025. That includes 15.8 million Marketplace plan selections in the 30 states using the federal government health care platform and 7.2 million in 20 states and the District of Columbia using their own platforms.

A news release from CMS issued in January 2025 said that around 24.2 million people signed up during that year’s open enrollment period.

The Epoch Times contacted CMS for additional comment and did not receive a response by publication time.