Fox Called 750,000 People 'Fraudsters.' Vance Said Some Were 'Probably Legitimate.'

Imagine your health insurance gets cancelled because a salesman you never met forged your signature. Now imagine the news calls you the crook.

On September 22, the government's health agency, CMS, announced it was "canceling approximately 315,000 unauthorized enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals" in Obamacare. Read the press release. The people it goes after are "agents and brokers": over 200 termination notices, 569 more warnings. The word "fraudster" does not appear.

Fox News found it anyway. Headline: "White House to yank 750,000 fraudsters off ObamaCare, save taxpayers $2.2 billion, Vance says." First line: "750,000 fraudulent Obamacare recipients." Not the brokers. The recipients. All of them.

Then, a few paragraphs down, Vice President Vance in Fox's own story: "Now, some of those people were probably legitimate."

Everyone else hedged. ABC: "allegedly fraudulent enrollments." NBC: people the government "says were 'fraudulently' enrolled," plus an expert from KFF saying many "were legitimately enrolled and simply did not respond in time." Fox alone skipped the maybe.

Here's the part that stings. Fox knew better. In December 2025 Fox reported that "many individuals do not even know they are signing up for health insurance." In June 2026 its headline said "alleged fraudsters" and its story explained "phantom enrollments": brokers signing people up "without their knowledge." By September, "alleged" was gone and the phantoms had become the villains.

To be fair, there were real broker scams, and Fox's story quotes Vance on one. But a rogue broker's victim who missed a letter is not a criminal. In our view, when a newsroom drops the word "alleged" for three quarters of a million people, it should at least tell them why.