The Vice President JD Vance-led Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have identified and suspended 70 hospice and home health businesses in Los Angeles that were flagged as high-risk fraudulent providers, Breitbart News has learned.
A source familiar with the matter told Breitbart News of the suspensions on Wednesday.
“As the task force to root out waste, fraud and abuse ramps up its work, we expect this number to grow exponentially,” a source told Breitbart News.
The task force, which President Donald Trump established earlier this month, seeks to build on the work of addressing Minnesota fraud that Vance and CMS Administrator Dr Mehmet Oz announced last month, a source familiar said.
On February 25, Vance announced that the administration was halting “certain amounts of Medicaid funding” to Minnesota until the state government learns “to be good stewards” of taxpayer dollars. Oz noted that there would be about $259 million in “deferred payments for Medicaid” to the state.
The task force, through interagency coordination, will examine every state for waste, fraud, and abuse, a source told Breitbart News, adding that the task force will follow CMS’s template in its early work, partly because of CMS’s data infrastructure for locating and taking action against those who may be committing fraud.
According to a source familiar with the matter, CMS has an AI-driven internal fraud detection system that can both flag claims for review and block claims flagged as likely fraudulent, and it will be scaled throughout the government to aid the task force in its mission. The task force is in the process of onboarding CMS technologists to scale the AI system.
In a statement to Breitbart News, a spokesperson from Vance’s office said the vice president “looks forward to carrying out the President’s War on Fraud.”
“The American people deserve better than being ripped off by people who hate this country, and the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud will ensure that essential taxpayer-funded services are used to support the hard-working Americans who rely on them, instead of being used by fraudsters and criminals,” the spokesperson added.
