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By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - The Trump administration is pausing over $1 billion in Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota "because of suspected fraud and noncompliance," U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said on Tuesday.
"If those states want that money they need to provide documentations that these payments are legitimate," Kennedy said at a news conference alongside CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
The pause is the latest in a series of payment suspensions mostly at Democratic-run states as Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy, and Oz spearhead a campaign the White House has called an "unrelenting" war on fraud.
Kennedy said the administration suspects that much of the questionable spending in California involves in-home services, and 14 high risk areas that Minnesota's own legislative auditor identified as vulnerable to fraud.
Oz and Kennedy did not provide evidence of the alleged fraud.
Kennedy said he was also expanding exclusion authority both to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the health department's Office of the Inspector General, allowing them to remove "bad actors" from federal healthcare programs and potentially ban them permanently from returning.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington and Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Chizu Nomiyama)
