WASHINGTON \u2014 The Trump administration is pausing $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota \u200bover “suspected fraud and noncompliance,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“If those states want that money they need to provide documentation that these payments \u200care legitimate,” Kennedy said at a news conference alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.<\/p>\n
CMS \u2060is deferring approximately $867.5 million in federal Medicaid \u200bpayments to California and $199 million to Minnesota, \u2060according to the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n
The pause is the latest \u200cin a series of \u200cpayment suspensions mostly in Democratic-run states as Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy and \u2060Oz lead a campaign the White House has \u2060called an “unrelenting” war on fraud.<\/p>\n
Kennedy said the administration suspects much of the questionable California spending involves in-home services. The Minnesota deferrals target 14 high-risk areas the state’s own legislative auditor identified as vulnerable to fraud.<\/p>\n
“If it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore,” Oz said. He and Kennedy cited data anomalies and outlier billing \u200cpatterns but offered no proof of fraud.<\/p>\n
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz \u200brejected the move as political retribution against Minnesota, saying the administration was punishing children, seniors and people with disabilities rather than fraudsters. He said it “is cutting more money in healthcare than they’ve prosecuted for fraud.”<\/p>\n
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the move a recycled political stunt and said in a post on X that California was being targeted for political reasons. He said the state opposes fraud and would “collaborate with CMS \u200bin good faith efforts to combat fraud,” arguing its in-home program saves money by keeping seniors and \u200cdisabled people out \u200cof costlier \u2060nursing homes.<\/p>\n
The deferrals are pauses, not permanent cuts, and do not affect benefits or eligibility. States recover the funds by showing claims meet federal requirements; Minnesota has already returned documents that CMS is reviewing, Oz said.<\/p>\n
Kennedy said he was also expanding exclusion authority to CMS and \u200cthe HHS inspector general, letting \u200bthem remove “bad actors” from federal healthcare programs and \u200cpotentially ban them permanently.<\/p>\n
Contributing: Susan Heavey and Puyaan Singh<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The Trump administration is pausing $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota \u200bover “suspected…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6996,6995,9180,1570,6813,1286,721,972,100,13,4201,6997,127,4509,821,4591,19],"class_list":["post-407631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-finance","tag-health","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-law","tag-local","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}