Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force is now sitting on roughly $1.4 billion in frozen federal payments after launching a sweeping crackdown on suspected Medicare and Medicaid fraud operations tied to home health and hospice providers across the country.
And according to Trump administration officials, the most revealing part may be what happened after the money stopped flowing: almost nobody called to complain.
Officials told Fox News Digital that approximately 90% of the providers whose payments were suspended never even contacted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services after losing access to federal funds. For investigators, that silence raised an obvious question — if these were legitimate businesses serving actual patients, why weren’t they urgently demanding answers?
The administration believes many of them were never legitimate operations in the first place.
“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.”
The effort has become one of the Trump administration’s highest-profile domestic enforcement campaigns, targeting what officials describe as massive abuse inside federally funded healthcare and pandemic-era relief programs. California, Minnesota, and parts of South Florida have emerged as major focal points for investigators examining networks of alleged shell companies, fake providers, and international fraud rings siphoning billions from taxpayers.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, now leading CMS under Trump, delivered some of the administration’s bluntest comments yet this week while discussing the scale of the alleged corruption. Appearing on Fox News, Oz claimed foreign criminal organizations and hostile governments may be deeply embedded in some of the schemes.
“We’ve got Russian government involvement, we believe, in Los Angeles,” Oz said. “We’ve got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York.”
He also described what officials call a “Cuban connection” tied to fraudulent medical equipment suppliers operating in South Florida. According to Oz, there are now more durable medical equipment suppliers in parts of Miami than McDonald’s restaurants, with some operators allegedly fleeing the country once investigators begin closing in.
The California hospice scandal has become especially alarming. Last month, investigators suspended 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies in Los Angeles alone over suspected fraud involving more than $600 million in questionable billing.
Industry insiders say many of these operations barely existed outside paperwork submitted to government agencies.
At a congressional hearing earlier this year, California Hospice and Palliative Care Association president Sheila Clark stunned lawmakers by describing “ghost hospices” that appeared to operate out of empty storefronts, burrito stands, and retail spaces.
“You’d be amazed at how many hospices… you can walk up to the door in California and there is nobody there,” Clark testified. “You can see five months’ worth of mail stacked up.”
“How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand?” she asked lawmakers. “How do you put a hospice in a retail store?”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently announced arrests tied to one massive alleged hospice fraud operation accused of stealing roughly $267 million through fake billing to Medi-Cal.
The crackdown extends well beyond healthcare. The administration also revealed this month that the Small Business Administration referred more than 562,000 suspected fraudulent pandemic-relief loans totaling over $22 billion to the Treasury Department for collection efforts. Officials claim many of those cases were flagged during the Biden administration but never aggressively pursued.
“The task force has made clear that the Biden administration’s policy of giving direct cash payments to fraudsters is over,” one senior White House official concluded.
