The numbers are staggering, and the crackdown is finally matching the scale of the problem.

Vice President JD Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force, working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has withheld $1.4 billion in federal funding from home health and hospice providers suspected of defrauding Medicare. On top of that, CMS announced a sweeping six-month nationwide moratorium on new Medicare enrollments for hospice and home health agencies to stop the bleeding while investigators clean house.

The freeze took effect Tuesday. It is designed to shut down a fraud pipeline that has been draining billions from a program meant to serve America’s seniors and most vulnerable patients.

The announcement came directly from CMS, which laid out just how deep the rot goes in these two provider categories.

CMS described the action in a press release:

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CMS announced a nationwide six-month, data-driven Medicare enrollment moratorium for hospice and home health agencies, coordinated with Vice President JD Vance’s Anti-Fraud Task Force. The agency identified hospice and home health as high-risk categories where fraudulent actors have exploited Medicare patients and taxpayers on a massive scale. The moratoria apply to initial Medicare enrollment applications and certain changes in majority ownership, because ownership changes can be used to obscure control by bad actors. Existing enrolled hospice and home health providers will continue serving Medicare beneficiaries without interruption during the moratorium. CMS said it will use the freeze period to intensify targeted investigations, deploy advanced data analytics, and accelerate the removal of suspected fraudulent providers from the program. The agency also noted that its recent enforcement work with the Vance task force has already suspended payments to 773 hospices and 23 home health agencies suspected of fraud in Los Angeles alone, representing roughly $70 million in suspended funds so far.

That last detail is critical. A single metro area, Los Angeles, accounted for nearly 800 suspected fraudulent providers. And CMS made the moratorium nationwide specifically to prevent bad actors from hopping across state lines to dodge state-level enforcement pauses and set up shop somewhere else.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz did not mince words, saying bad actors have been exploiting vulnerable Medicare patients and stealing taxpayer money.

The scope of the fraud is eye-opening.

Fox News Digital reported on the broader enforcement wave and the telling silence from providers whose payments have been cut off:

Fox News Digital reported that Vice President Vance’s anti-fraud task force has now withheld $1.4 billion in federal funding from home health and hospice providers across the country following a wave of suspensions tied to suspected fraud in California, Minnesota, and other states. Perhaps the most revealing detail in the report: approximately 90% of the suspended providers never even contacted CMS after their payments were cut off. Trump administration officials interpreted that silence as a powerful signal that many of the suspended providers were not legitimate operations serving real patients, especially when real providers would normally fight immediately to restore reimbursements needed for patient care and payroll.

Fox also reported that the current nationwide push followed an earlier Los Angeles-focused enforcement action involving 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies, with alleged theft in that wave alone estimated at more than $600 million. The report tied the enforcement work to a larger pattern of ghost-provider abuse in the hospice space, including warnings from California hospice leaders about supposed providers with no real office activity. A Vance spokesperson told Fox that the task force is stopping taxpayer dollars before they fall into fraudsters’ hands and delivering savings under President Trump’s war on fraud.

Read that again: 90% of suspended providers simply vanished. They did not call. They did not contest the suspension. They did not ask when payments would resume. That is not the behavior of legitimate businesses that depend on Medicare reimbursements to care for patients. That is the behavior of shell operations that got caught and walked away.

To be clear about what this moratorium does and does not do: no current Medicare patient loses access to their hospice or home health provider. Every legitimately enrolled agency continues serving beneficiaries. The freeze applies only to new enrollment applications and certain ownership transfers that fraudsters use to disguise who is really running the operation.

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What it does do is slam the door on new scam outfits trying to get on the Medicare gravy train for the next six months while CMS uses advanced data analytics and targeted investigations to root out the ones already inside the system.

This is what draining the swamp looks like when the swamp is filled with phony hospice companies billing Medicare for patients who are not dying and home health agencies billing for care that never happens. President Donald Trump promised a war on waste, fraud, and abuse. Vice President Vance’s task force is delivering real results, $1.4 billion in withheld funds and counting, with a nationwide enforcement architecture that makes it harder for scammers to run and hide.

Seniors deserve a Medicare program that works for them, not for criminals. This is a very good start.

 

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