Medicare froze new end-of-life care enrollments for six months

CMS halted hospice enrollment nationally; a federal task force has already suspended 43 legitimate providers.

In May, CMS announced a six-month national freeze on new hospice enrollments in Medicare, plus heightened oversight in California, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Texas — states it flags for elevated fraud risk. The agency says patient access is unaffected, with roughly 7,000 approved hospices still operating. But a Washington Post investigation in June found the federal anti-fraud task force had already suspended the licences of 43 legitimate hospices.

California is the centre of the fight, and was already fighting. The state auditor counted about 2,800 hospice organisations there in 2022, roughly 94% of them for-profit — an inversion of the nonprofit-dominated industry of twenty years ago. One study puts for-profit operators around $2,100 ahead per patient in pretax profit. The state has held its own licensing moratorium since 2021, its attorney general called the fraud an epidemic last year, and emergency rules effective in late June added prescreening, management qualifications, higher nurse-to-patient ratios and office requirements.

Hospice is one of the few places in American medicine where cheaper and kinder point the same direction: a 2023 University of Chicago report, commissioned by industry associations, estimated that Medicare patients choosing hospice over hospital care saved taxpayers more than $3 billion in 2019. The setback is not the enforcement — it is the spillover. Researchers describe clinicians hesitating to refer and families unsure whom to trust, which quietly gates a benefit that costs less than the alternative.

Watch whether the freeze lifts on schedule and whether the 43 suspensions are reversed. The savings figure carries an obvious asterisk: the industry paid for the study.

Source: KFF Health News