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Vice President J.D. Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has taken action to crack down on shady activities in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) as it pertains to hospice and home health care.
CMS will implement a six-month nationwide moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies, something the agency described in a press release as “a key source of fraudulent activity.”
Vance was appointed as the leader of the anti-fraud White House task force by President Donald Trump earlier this year, where he has been given authority to investigate possible fraud that is typically rampant in federal programs.
According to Fox News, Vance’s task force has withheld a whopping $1.4 billion in federal funding from home health and hospice providers across the country amid its investigations in several states, such as Minnesota and California.
“We’ve seen systemic and deeply troubling fraud in the hospice and home health space, with bad actors exploiting some of our most vulnerable Medicare patients and stealing money from the American taxpayer,” said CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in a statement on Wednesday.
CMS announced that during this six-month moratorium, the agency will continue investigations and work to remove hospice and HHA providers from Medicare programs that may be suspected of engaging in fraudulent behavior. Current enrollees will not be impacted by the moratorium, the agency said.
Further, CMS said on Wednesday that 773 hospices and 23 HHAs have had a collective $70 million in federal payments suspended in just Los Angeles, California, amid this collaborative task force investigation.
Other areas of investigative activity include potential fraud hotspots in Arizona, Ohio, Nevada, Georgia, and Texas.
According to Fox News, a shocking 90 percent of the suspended hospice and HHA providers so far have not asked CMS to restart these payments, suggesting that such providers were potentially illegitimate.
Vice President Vance’s anti-fraud efforts have yielded DOGE-like results, as has the Trump administration as a whole. On Wednesday, for example, the Daily Caller reported that the Trump administration, via the Department of Education, blocked $60 million in fraudulent student loans, amounting to 300,000 fraudulent applications.
“Under President Trump, we are unleashing the most aggressive federal anti-fraud efforts in American history,” Vance stated on X this week. “We won’t rest until we root out every bit of fraud infecting our government and screwing over taxpayers.”
Vice President Vance is scheduled to deliver remarks on fraud on Wednesday at 2 PM EST. Watch live coverage of the vice president’s press conference on RSBN via YouTube, Rumble, X, Truth Social, and Facebook.
