On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) extended the temporary moratorium on Medicare hospice and home health enrollment for another six months.
The extended moratorium will apply nationwide, as did the original freezes implemented on May 13, 2026. Unlike the original moratorium, the extensions will allow currently enrolled hospices and home health agencies to add new practice locations within their existing enrollment.
The extensions will not affect existing Medicare enrollments or prevent currently enrolled providers from continuing to deliver services.
“We’ve made real progress over the past six months, but fraud in hospice and home health persists and our work isn’t finished,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “Medicare beneficiaries deserve protection from these bad actors, and American taxpayers need to know the programs they rely on aren’t being bled dry by fraudsters.”
The moratoria suspend any initial Medicare enrollment applications for new home health agencies and hospices nationwide. It also applies to certain changes in majority ownership that require providers to submit new Medicare enrollment applications.
The agency has the authority to extend such moratoria in six-month increments.
“CMS continued to observe rampant fraudulent activity in this space, so the agency took decisive action to protect Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayer dollars by implementing a six-month, nationwide data-driven moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospices,” a CMS spokesperson told Home Health Care News’ sister publication, Hospice News, in an email. “The moratorium has allowed CMS to halt the influx of new providers into this high-risk category — a key source of fraudulent activity.”
The six-month restriction is designed to give CMS additional time to investigate suspicious billing activity, strengthen program integrity safeguards and prevent potentially fraudulent operators from entering the Medicare system, CMS indicated.
The agency characterized the moratorium as part of a broader effort to protect Medicare beneficiaries and taxpayer dollars while addressing vulnerabilities in high-risk provider categories.
The initiative allowed the agency to use advanced data analytics to identify questionable billing patterns, investigate potential fraud schemes and remove unscrupulous operators from the Medicare program, according to CMS.
Although many healthcare organizations have expressed support for CMS’s efforts to combat fraudulent operators, the nationwide enrollment restriction has created significant challenges for legitimate providers.
The nationwide Medicare enrollment pause, implemented to combat fraud, has disrupted provider expansion and raised concerns about patient access to care, particularly in underserved communities, according to stakeholders in the space.
The enrollment pause has prevented some organizations from opening new locations, expanding operations or completing planned acquisitions and affiliations.
Providers seeking to establish new agencies, including those operating in markets without widespread evidence of fraud, have also encountered barriers to entering the Medicare program.
Some organizations have characterized the approach as overly broad, arguing that targeted enforcement would better address fraudulent activity without unnecessarily restricting legitimate market growth.
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Hospice News Senior Editor Jim Parker contributed reporting to this story.
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