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.

CMS described the action in a press release, identifying 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 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 withheld funds. The agency also highlighted that a single metro area, Los Angeles, accounted for nearly 800 suspected fraudulent providers.

The most revealing detail is that approximately 90% of the suspended providers never contacted CMS after their payments were cut off. This behavior is not typical of legitimate businesses that rely on Medicare reimbursements to care for patients. Instead, it indicates shell operations that got caught and walked away without contesting the suspension.

This enforcement action targets new scam outfits attempting to get on the Medicare gravy train while CMS uses advanced data analytics and targeted investigations to root out fraudulent providers already operating within the system. The moratorium does not disrupt current patient access to hospice or home health services. It specifically applies only to new enrollments and certain ownership transfers that fraudsters use to disguise their operations.