A Vance-led anti-fraud task force has withheld $1.4 billion from home health and hospice providers suspected of fraud, Fox News Digital reported.
A federal anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance has withheld $1.4 billion from home health and hospice providers nationwide after suspensions targeting operations suspected of fraud, Fox News Digital reported, citing Trump administration officials.
The action marks a major escalation in the administration’s effort to stop payments before federal funds reach providers officials consider suspicious. The suspensions include operations in California, Minnesota and other states, but the available report did not provide a provider-by-provider accounting or final findings in each case.
Administration officials told Fox News Digital that about 90% of the suspended providers had not contacted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services since payments were cut off. Officials said they view that lack of communication as a sign that many of the providers were not legitimate businesses.
“The vice president’s task force continues to stop the flow of taxpayer funds before they fall into the hands of fraudsters and deliver savings to the American people,” a spokesperson for Vance told Fox News Digital. “This is great momentum in the fight for the President’s War on Fraud.”
Vance hosted the first meeting of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud on March 27. The task force has already focused heavily on hospice and home health operations, including in Los Angeles, where Fox News Digital previously reported that 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies had been suspended on suspicion of fraud. The alleged theft tied to those Los Angeles suspensions was estimated at more than $600 million.
The crackdown follows warnings from industry and government officials about questionable hospice operations in California. Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, told the House Ways and Means Committee in April that some licensed hospice locations appeared to be empty or operating from implausible sites.
“You’d be amazed at how many hospices... you can walk up to the door in California and there is nobody there,” Clark told lawmakers, according to the report. “You can see five months’ worth of mail stacked up. And yet, they passed a survey. How did that happen?”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently announced the arrests of five people linked to an alleged multimillion-dollar hospice billing scheme involving Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. Fox News Digital reported that the scheme allegedly brought in $267 million through fraudulent billing.
The administration has also tied its broader anti-fraud push to other federal programs, including pandemic-era lending. The Small Business Administration recently referred 562,000 suspected fraudulent loans totaling more than $22.2 billion to the Treasury Department for collection, according to the same report.
The next test for the task force will be whether suspended payments lead to recoveries, enforcement cases or restored funding for any providers able to demonstrate they were operating legitimately.
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