CMS defers $2B in Medicaid payments to California amid hospice fraud crisis
Plus: DermTech to pay $5M for billing Medicare with unreliable skin cancer tests. The day's rules, money, and enforcement, sourced and tiered below.
Plus: DermTech to pay $5M for billing Medicare with unreliable skin cancer tests. The day's rules, money, and enforcement, sourced and tiered below.
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American Health Intel
Rules · Money · Medicine · Decoded daily
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| The Regulator |
Thursday, August 27, 2026 |
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CMS defers $2B in Medicaid payments to California amid hospice fraud crisis
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Plus: DermTech to pay $5M for billing Medicare with unreliable skin cancer tests. The day's rules, money, and enforcement, sourced and tiered below.
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Enforcement Confidence: Medium
The Trump administration has deferred more than $2 billion in Medicaid payments to California, the insurance program covering low-income patients, over an escalating hospice fraud crisis.
Over 1,000 California hospices have lost Medicare billing privileges since early 2025. The state's Attorney General has filed more than 100 criminal fraud cases since a 2021 provider crackdown began.
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Why it matters
This shows how deep hospice fraud has spread in California and why patients caught up in it can lose access to normal medical care for months while providers get sorted out.
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Enforcement Confidence: Medium
DermTech, a company that made genetic tests for melanoma, will pay up to $5 million after the Justice Department said it kept billing Medicare for tests it knew had failed quality checks.
The company, now liquidating in bankruptcy, allegedly used an unvalidated testing range from October 2022 to March 2023 and never refunded Medicare once the problem was flagged internally.
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Why it matters
It's a reminder that a lab's internal quality control failure, if hidden rather than disclosed, can turn into a federal fraud case even after the company is gone.
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