Mehmet Oz, the man running President Trump's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, just shut the front door on one of the most brazen taxpayer ripoffs in federal history. CMS has imposed a six-month nationwide moratorium on the approval of new durable medical equipment businesses, the suppliers that sell wheelchairs, canes, and other home medical devices through Medicare.
The reason is as simple as it is infuriating: many of these businesses don't actually exist.
Oz laid it out on Fox News in terms that leave no room for ambiguity. These aren't billing errors or paperwork problems. They're phantom operations, run by foreign nationals who create shell companies, steal Medicare beneficiary numbers, bill the federal government for millions in products that never ship, and then vanish.
We announced a nationwide moratorium in this country for six months. You may not start a new durable medical equipment business.
And then Oz got specific about who's doing it and how:
Many of these businesses are owned by Cuban nationals, by the way. They bill falsely for $5 million for a month of fake stuff. They flee back to Cuba. We try to go after the money. It's already gone. It's been shipped overseas, and everyone's looking around to see who's the last guy standing.
No payroll. No employees. No products. No customers. Just a fake storefront, a stolen beneficiary number, and a one-way ticket to Havana with American taxpayer money in hand.
The moratorium didn't come out of nowhere, Breitbart reported. During his 2026 State of the Union address, President Trump announced that Vice President JD Vance would lead a formal "war on fraud" targeting the systematic looting of federal programs.
Trump did not mince words about what's driving it:
Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings those problems right here, to the USA — and it is the American people who pay the price, in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes, and perhaps most importantly, crime.
He pointed to Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have, by his estimate, "pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer," adding that "in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse."
Vance, for his part, made clear this isn't just about Medicare. The rot extends into Medicaid, into daycare programs, into every corner of the welfare state where verification is lax and enforcement is nonexistent. He told Fox News:
How many illegal aliens are on Medicaid? We know that it's billions and billions of dollars that should go to American citizens. It's going to illegal aliens. How many fraudulent daycare centers have been set up where that money should go to American citizens to help their kids get into childcare? Instead, it's being stolen from them by illegal aliens in our country…
Vance also noted that the federal government has tools to fight this fraud that have simply never been used. He and the president discussed them months ago, Trump said "let's do it," and the administration is now executing aggressively.
The Cuban Medicare scheme isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a much larger pattern of foreign criminal networks exploiting America's wealth and its unwillingness to enforce its own laws.
A detective interviewed by City-Journal in January described the problem from the street level. The portrait he painted should disturb anyone who still believes this is a marginal issue.
In my experience, nearly 100 percent of high-dollar, stranger-on-stranger frauds are committed by foreigners. I cannot think of one case of mine where a native-born American committed a fraud of over $1,000 against a stranger. Not in my entire career.
That is a staggering claim. And the detective backed it up with specifics. He described organized Romanian credit card crews who:
When they finally get caught, they cycle through a justice system that treats their crimes as low priority. And the detective explained exactly why they keep coming back:
Though they involve large sums of money, these are nonviolent crimes, so the justice system doesn't take them that seriously. Eventually these criminals will get caught, but they are not extraditable out of state, and we're not allowed to call immigration.
Not allowed to call immigration. Romanian passports in hand, and nobody picks up the phone to call ICE because blue-state sanctuary laws forbid it. A few months in jail, and they're back on the street running the same play.
This is where the policy failure becomes a policy choice. The detective's assessment of sanctuary jurisdictions was blunt and worth reading in full:
Politicians have passed 'sanctuary state' laws and reduced criminal penalties, which, in effect, are advertisements saying, 'We're open for business for fraudsters. You probably won't get caught. If you do get caught, you probably won't get convicted. If you do get convicted, you won't get that much time. And you never have to worry about getting kicked out the country.'
That's not a conservative talking point. That's a law enforcement officer describing the operational reality he deals with every day. The United States holds roughly one-third of the world's wealth with just over 4 percent of its population. That imbalance alone makes America the world's richest target. Add sanctuary policies, reduced penalties, and a political establishment that treats any scrutiny of immigrant crime as bigotry, and you've built the perfect environment for exactly what's happening.
The left has spent years insisting that connecting immigration to crime is xenophobic fear-mongering. Meanwhile, Cuban nationals are billing Medicare for $5 million a month in fake medical equipment and flying home with the cash. Romanian crews are manufacturing counterfeit IDs in their cars between gym parking lots. And American seniors are getting their benefits stolen and their identities compromised.
At some point, the people insisting this isn't happening have to explain where the money went.
Oz described the fraud as "weaponized," a word choice that implies something beyond simple criminal opportunism. Whether or not a foreign government is coordinating the theft, the scale and sophistication of these operations go well beyond petty grift.
The six-month moratorium on new durable medical equipment businesses is a blunt instrument. Legitimate entrepreneurs trying to enter the market will feel it too. But when phantom companies are hemorrhaging millions from a program meant to serve elderly and disabled Americans, the bleeding has to stop before you can sort the honest applicants from the fraudsters.
President Trump framed the stakes clearly:
This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn't believe.
Vance has his mandate. Oz has his moratorium. The administration is moving. The question now is whether the institutions, the courts, the state governments, the entrenched bureaucracies, will help or stand in the way.
If history is any guide, the same people who built the sanctuary framework will call the crackdown cruel. They always do. But the cruelty was never the enforcement. The cruelty was letting it happen in the first place, one stolen beneficiary number at a time.
