Minnesota Quietly Purged 18,000 Dead Medicaid Providers. The Number Was Missing from Its Big Announcement.

Like purging inactive voters, the feds have to force the issue.

On June 4, the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) announced the results of its federally forced review of the state's highest-risk Medicaid providers: 5,583 examined, 3,411 removed—a 61 percent failure rate. The number led newscasts across the state and made national headlines.

A bigger number should have appeared—but didn't.

In a subsection of the DHS program-integrity webpage, filed under "Prevention," the department discloses that between October 2025 and March 2026 it terminated 18,109 Medicaid providers that had not billed the program in at least a year. Add the 761 provider agencies cut for inactivity in October, and Minnesota removed nearly 19,000 dormant enrollments from its Medicaid payment system in roughly six months. That figure was absent from the June announcement, never granted a press release of its own, and, so far, almost entirely unreported.

Massive Number of Inactive Providers

The scale is hard to overstate. DHS pegs Minnesota's Medicaid provider file at 313,789 enrollments. The dormant purge alone erased roughly 6 percent of it. This also didn't count removals done during the revalidation process. Counting the revalidation removals, the state has shed more than 22,000 provider enrollments, about one in fourteen, since October.

A provider number that hasn't billed in a year is not harmless clutter. Think of it in the same way you'd consider voter rolls that have not had inactive voters purged. It is a live credential attached to a dead operation: enrolled in the payment system, cleared to bill, and unwatched. Dormant enrollments are the raw material of billing schemes—bought, borrowed, or reactivated whenever a fraudster needs a clean identity. That is not this reporter's characterization—it is the federal government's. Things got so bad, the feds had to step in. On January 6, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz signed a formal Federal Register finding that Minnesota was substantially out of compliance with federal program-integrity law (the provider screening and enrollment safeguards of 42 CFR Part 455), citing "widespread and ongoing" fraud, waste, and abuse identified by CMS, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general, the FBI, and the Justice Department. According to Minnesota's own corrective action plan, CMS suggested the state disenroll inactive providers specifically to safeguard against fraudulent billing.

Which points to the most damning detail in the documents: the cleanup was Washington's idea.

In the corrective action plan signed December 31, 2025 by State Medicaid Director John Connolly, DHS recounts that during fall 2025 discussions with CMS about shutting down the fraud-ridden Housing Stabilization Services program, federal officials suggested Minnesota purge its inactive providers. DHS, by its own account, "immediately acted on that suggestion." The plan then lays out the operation in stages: the October batch, an immediate cut of roughly 4,300 out-of-network and out-of-state providers embedded in managed-care networks, notices to about 800 more, and a review of another 13,000 by the end of February. The final count, 18,109, matches the blueprint nearly to the digit.

Consider what that admission means. Medicare, under longstanding federal regulation, deactivates a provider's billing privileges after 12 consecutive months without a claim. This is basic hygiene. Minnesota's Medicaid program had no equivalent practice in force until a federal official raised the idea in a meeting—six decades into the program's existence, in a state already engulfed in the Feeding Our Future and autism-services fraud scandals.

The Feds Had to Step In

None of it was voluntary. CMS announced in December it would withhold $2 billion in federal Medicaid funding until Minnesota produced an acceptable corrective plan. CMS rejected the state's first plan as deficient, approved a revised version on March 19, and has separately deferred roughly $350 million in federal payments while it scrutinizes past spending.

The pattern is familiar to readers of this column. In Michigan, our investigation ran more than 600 Medicaid-billing entities against the state's corporate registry and found 21 dissolved corporations that billed $118.8 million after the state declared them legally dead. One of them, Grace Points Inc., kept billing for twenty months after its certificate of dissolution was filed—from a building that had been demolished. Dead on paper and piles of rubble do not equate to done with billing. An enrollment nobody is watching is an enrollment somebody can use.

Which raises the question Minnesota has not answered: what did these 18,109 providers bill before they went silent? By the department's own definition, each of them billed nothing in the trailing twelve months. What they collected in the years before that is, in theory, checkable: the federal government now publishes provider-level Medicaid billing histories covering every state. But matching those histories to Minnesota’s purge requires the one thing the state has not released—the list. Without it, no one outside government can say what the 18,109 billed before going dark, or answer the Michigan question: were any of them billing while legally dead? DHS holds the list. It has not published it.

What the department did release, it released selectively. The names of disenrolled providers were sent to counties, tribes, and managed-care organizations to handle patient transitions. The public—whose money flowed through the system—didn't get those reports. The 3,411 revalidation removals will shrink as appeals restore providers; the 18,109 will not, because there is no one on the other end to appeal. And when state Rep. Kristin Robbins (R), chair of the Minnesota House's fraud-oversight committee, sought clarification on the department's numbers in June, she received out-of-office replies saying officials would return in July, the Washington Examiner reported.

System-wide Problem

And the story is no longer just Minnesota's. In April 2026, Oz sent letters to every state Medicaid agency in the country demanding swift revalidation of high-risk providers and a written strategy within 30 days. In February, HHS quietly published something that changes the accountability math: a provider-level dataset of Medicaid payments from 2018 through 2024, covering every state. The public can now run the dead-provider arithmetic on any Medicaid program in America.

Minnesota's provider file carried nearly 19,000 dormant enrollments, and it took a $2 billion threat of withheld funds to clear them out. Forty-nine other states are overdue for the same hard look.

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