On May 13, 2026, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced a six-month nationwide moratorium on new Medicare enrollment for hospice providers and home health agencies. This means that no new hospices or HHAs will be enrolled into Medicare during this period, and that certain changes in majority ownership that would require re-enrollment are also blocked.
This is the third moratorium CMS has imposed in 2026 alone, following a similar freeze on durable medical equipment suppliers earlier this year. Together, these represent some of the most significant fraud prevention actions in the agency's history.
If you're an existing hospice or home health provider, the moratorium doesn't change your enrollment status. You can continue operating, submitting claims, and serving Medicare beneficiaries. But that doesn't mean this announcement is something to read and move past. The moratorium is a signal, and the compliance implications for existing providers are worth taking seriously.
CMS is responding to well-documented patterns of fraud in hospice and home health, particularly in states like Arizona, California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas. Enforcement actions have targeted the recruitment of patients who don't qualify for services, falsification of medical documentation, billing for services never rendered, and kickback arrangements between providers and referral sources.
The numbers are significant. In Los Angeles alone, CMS has suspended payments to 773 hospices and 23 home health agencies suspected of fraud, representing $70 million in frozen funds. Nationally, hundreds of providers have been revoked or deactivated.
The moratorium gives CMS room to intensify investigations, deploy advanced data analytics, and accelerate removal of bad actors already in the system, without new providers entering the pipeline at the same time.
When CMS imposes a moratorium, the enforcement environment around that provider category tightens across the board. This isn't just about keeping new providers out. It's about scrutinizing the ones already in.
Several parallel actions are already underway that directly affect existing providers. CMS has launched nationwide hospice site visits to verify operations and identify suspicious activity. A new publicly available hospice scoring system now assigns risk scores based on spending variations and care patterns. Enhanced screening measures include site verification and fingerprinting-based background checks. And pre-claim and post-claim review demonstrations are active in Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas, allowing CMS to evaluate claims before payments go out.
The CMS FAQ on the moratorium makes one point worth highlighting: the moratorium only impacts new enrollments, not ongoing compliance obligations. That's not a reassurance. It's a reminder. Every existing hospice and HHA is expected to maintain full compliance with Medicare Conditions of Participation, and the resources CMS is freeing up by pausing new enrollment are being redirected toward evaluating whether they are.
For compliance officers and administrators at hospice and home health organizations, this is a moment to take an honest look at the state of your program. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because the regulatory environment has shifted, and the standard of scrutiny has changed.
There are a few areas worth prioritizing.
Fraud, waste, and abuse training. FWA training has always been a Medicare requirement, but its relevance just became more acute. Generic, checkbox-style FWA training may have been sufficient in a lower-enforcement environment. It isn't now. Staff need to understand not just the concept of fraud, waste, and abuse, but the specific schemes CMS is targeting: falsified eligibility determinations, phantom billing, improper referral relationships, and documentation that doesn't support the services being claimed. Training should use real-world scenarios that reflect the clinical and operational realities staff encounter every day.
Documentation integrity. A significant portion of the fraud CMS has identified involves documentation that doesn't support the level or type of care being billed. This often isn’t intentional fraud. In many cases, it reflects gaps in training, inconsistent practices across clinical teams, or documentation habits that haven't been updated as regulatory expectations have evolved. Now is a good time to assess whether your documentation practices would hold up under a targeted review.
Compliance infrastructure. Organizations that treat compliance as a standalone function, separate from operations, tend to be the most exposed when enforcement pressure increases. The organizations best positioned to navigate heightened scrutiny are the ones where compliance is embedded into onboarding, ongoing training, supervision, and daily clinical workflows. When compliance is part of how people work rather than something they complete once a year, it's far more durable.
Internal auditing. If your organization hasn't conducted an internal audit of billing patterns, documentation practices, and training completions recently, this is the time. The new hospice scoring system means CMS is already analyzing your data. Understanding what that data looks like from the outside in is critical before someone else does it for you.
This moratorium is part of a broader federal pattern. CMS, the Department of Justice, and the HHS Office of Inspector General are coordinating more closely than they have in years past. The enforcement infrastructure being built during this moratorium period, including the data analytics, the scoring systems, and the pre-claim review programs will represent the new baseline when the moratorium lifts.
For legitimate providers, this is ultimately a positive development. Fraud damages the reputation of the entire industry, drives up costs, and makes it harder for organizations doing the right work to operate sustainably. But benefiting from a cleaner market requires being able to demonstrate, clearly and consistently, that your organization meets the standard.
That starts with the systems you have in place to train, document, and verify compliance across your workforce.
Showd.me partners with hospice and home health organizations to deliver fully managed compliance training programs that address Medicare Conditions of Participation, including fraud, waste, and abuse prevention. If you're evaluating the strength of your compliance training in light of the current enforcement environment, we'd welcome the conversation.