760,000 People Lost Marketplace Coverage on August 31. Nobody Sent Them a Checklist.

If you buy health coverage through HealthCare.gov, log in tonight and look at two screens.

On August 31, CMS canceled about 315,000 Marketplace enrollments covering more than 760,000 people. If one of them was yours, the first sign may be a denied prescription in October rather than a letter in September.

The agency is not hiding any of this. It published the numbers on September 22 and expects roughly $2.2 billion in advance premium tax credits to come back as a result. It has terminated more than 200 agents and brokers since January. It sent 569 notices of intent to terminate to agents and brokers who filed implausibly high volumes of 2026 applications missing identifying information like a Social Security number.

The next day a rule landed in the Federal Register freezing the door shut. Effective September 22 and running until February 1, 2027, no agent or broker can register with the federal Marketplace for 2027 unless they already held a 2026 agreement. State-run exchanges are untouched.

The case for the freeze is specific, and it is damning. CMS says agents who first registered for 2026 were 2.8 times more likely than established ones to have unresolved income verification issues, 2.7 times more likely to be missing Social Security numbers, and 2.6 times more likely to have citizenship or immigration verification problems.

Here’s what they don’t tell you. Read the press release and the fact sheet end to end and you will find instructions for agents, instructions for brokers, new identity rules for 2027, and a line from CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz: “Every dollar lost to fraud is a dollar taken from hardworking taxpayers.” Fair enough. Neither document tells the 760,000 people a single thing to do next.

That silence is the part that costs you. An enrollment placed in your name without your say-so is not just a plan you didn’t want. It is a premium tax credit paid on your behalf all year, and you reconcile that on your federal return whether you asked for the plan or not. Which is exactly why CMS expects $2.2 billion back.

Do this now. Log into your Marketplace account, open your completed application under “Your applications,” and select “My Plans & Programs.” That screen names the plan you are actually enrolled in and the date the coverage started. If it isn’t the plan you picked, or there’s a plan sitting there you never picked, call the Marketplace Call Center at 1-800-318-2596. It runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it is the only line that can unwind a switch you didn’t make.

Then mark November 1. Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage starts that day and runs through January 15, and December 15 is the last day to enroll for coverage that begins January 1.

For 2027, CMS is adding the safeguard that should have been there all along. An agent or broker will have to get your electronic authorization before touching your application, every application they handle will need a verifiable Social Security number or immigration document number, and existing agents have to re-verify their own identity through Login.gov or ID.me.

Good rules. They show up after the bill.

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