Vance backs Cms Hospice Enrollment Moratorium for six months
The Trump administration will impose a cms hospice enrollment moratorium that blocks new home healthcare and hospice providers from enrolling in Medicare for at least the next six months. The policy leaves providers already registered with Medicare in place while new applicants in those categories are barred from signing up for reimbursement.
Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced the step on May 13, 2026, citing concerns about widespread fraud. CMS said the freeze will also give the agency time to account for hospice and home health expenditures under Medicare and create additional guidance.
Mehmet Oz and CMS
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services oversees Medicare, and Oz did not provide specific evidence to reporters to explain why the administration chose a nationwide bar instead of a narrower county-based pause. CMS has used that narrower approach before, including in 2013, when it barred new providers based in Florida's Miami-Dade County and several counties in Illinois.
The broader freeze is unusual compared with those earlier actions. It reaches every new home healthcare and hospice provider in the country, but it does not change the status of providers already registered with Medicare.
Stephen Lee on Medicare fraud
Former federal prosecutor Stephen Lee said, "It would be a mistake to think that this tool alone will work." His warning fits the limits built into the policy: the moratorium can stop new enrollments, but it does not by itself address providers already in the program or the existing spending that CMS said it wants to account for.
Medicare paid for hospice care for 1.8 million beneficiaries in 2024 at a cost of $28.3 billion. For patients and families looking for new providers, the immediate change is that new home healthcare and hospice operators cannot join Medicare during the freeze, while existing providers remain able to serve people already in the system.
