In its latest effort to crack down on fraud in federal healthcare programs, the Trump administration is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California, Vice President JD Vance announced Wednesday.
The measure, which follows the deferral of more than $350 million in Medicaid reimbursements to Minnesota earlier this year, was among several anti-fraud measures the administration unveiled Wednesday.
The others include reviewing every state’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which is tasked with investigating and prosecuting fraud among Medicaid providers, and placing a six-month nationwide moratorium on new enrollment of hospice and home health providers in Medicare.
While the administration has been criticized for focusing its anti-fraud efforts primarily on Democratic-led states, Vance insisted that its intentions are not political in nature.
“We want to protect Medicaid. We want to protect Medicare,” Vance said at an event on the White House campus. “But we can’t do that if the states that are administering those programs are allowing those programs to be fleeced by fraudsters.”
