The proposal aims at a specific abuse: scammers billing health programs under the names of recently deceased physicians. Its backers say the narrow fix could protect taxpayers without cutting benefits.
A Republican-backed bill targets fraud in Medicare and Medicaid by closing a narrow but costly loophole: the bill would prevent fraud by requiring states to check whether doctors are listed as deceased before automatically reenrolling them as providers.
Lawmakers say the bill is needed because criminals can use the credentials of recently deceased physicians to bill federal health programs. The proposal, H.R. 2309, the Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act, is listed by Congress.gov as introduced in the House on March 24, 2025, and has drawn bipartisan sponsors even as it is being framed as a GOP-backed fraud crackdown.
The loophole the bill targets
The core idea is simple: before a state automatically reenrolls a doctor who can receive Medicare or Medicaid payments, the state would have to check the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File.
That database is used across government and the private sector to verify deaths. In this case, lawmakers want it used as a guardrail against a blunt form of identity abuse: billing under a physician’s credentials after that physician has died.
According to a congressional announcement from Rep. Scott Peters’ office, the bill is based on findings from a U.S. Government Accountability Office study. The same announcement says a recent Health and Human Services inspector general report recommended that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services look for more opportunities to integrate death-data checks into oversight.
The measure does not create a sweeping new benefit rule. It is a provider-screening bill. Its target is not patients seeking care, but bad actors exploiting administrative gaps in payment systems.
A bipartisan bill with GOP branding
Although the trend around the proposal has been framed as a GOP bill, the legislation is not purely partisan. Peters, a California Democrat, and Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, announced the reintroduction of the Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act in April 2025.
Their announcement said the bill was also backed by Reps. Mike Kennedy of Utah, Tom Suozzi of New York and Nicole Malliotakis of New York. That mix matters because Medicare and Medicaid fraud bills often sit at the intersection of two political messages: protecting public money and protecting public benefits.
Peters argued that fraud in the programs hurts rightful beneficiaries and taxpayers. Evans said the programs should be protected for people who truly need them. Kennedy, a physician, framed the issue as stopping scammers from stealing tax dollars by taking advantage of a provider’s death.
That is why the proposal is easy for lawmakers to describe as common sense. It does not ask Congress to resolve the broader fights over Medicaid eligibility, Medicare solvency or health spending. It asks whether a dead doctor’s credentials should be automatically renewed without a death-record check.
Why the fraud message lands
Medicare and Medicaid are enormous programs, and even small weaknesses can become expensive when multiplied across large payment systems. Fraud prevention is politically durable because it promises savings without directly reducing services.
But there is an important distinction in health policy: improper payments are not always fraud. Some are caused by missing paperwork, coding errors, eligibility mistakes or documentation failures. Fraud involves intentional deception.
That distinction can get lost in campaign-style rhetoric. Still, deceased-provider billing is the kind of problem that is hard to defend as mere bureaucracy. If a payment system allows someone to bill under a dead physician’s identity, lawmakers can point to a concrete failure that should be fixable.
Malliotakis, in the lawmakers’ announcement, said New York alone is estimated to make $20 billion in improper Medicaid payments annually. That figure is presented as an improper-payment estimate, not a finding that all of that money is fraud. The bill’s supporters use numbers like that to argue that more verification is overdue.
What the checks would change
The bill’s practical effect would be felt inside state enrollment and reenrollment systems. Instead of letting certain provider records renew automatically without a death check, states would have to compare those records against the Social Security death database.
For readers trying to understand the mechanics, the proposal can be reduced to a few steps:
- States review doctors or providers set for automatic reenrollment.
- Those names are checked against the Social Security Administration Death Master File.
- If a provider appears to be deceased, the state can stop or investigate the reenrollment.
- The goal is to block fraudulent billing before payments go out.
That prevention-first approach is the point. Recovering money after fraud occurs can be difficult, slow and incomplete. A pre-enrollment check is meant to stop the account from remaining active in the first place.
The idea also reflects a broader shift in government oversight: agencies are increasingly expected to use existing data to catch obvious risk signals earlier. Death records are one of the clearest signals available when the question is whether a provider should still be active.
The limits of a narrow fix
The bill would not solve Medicare and Medicaid fraud by itself. Health care fraud can involve kickbacks, phantom services, inflated billing, unnecessary procedures, identity theft, organized schemes and providers who are very much alive.
There are also administrative questions. Data matching is only as good as the underlying records and the process used to resolve matches. A death-file hit may be straightforward in many cases, but agencies still need procedures to avoid mistakes and handle edge cases.
States also vary in technology, staffing and enrollment systems. A requirement that sounds simple in Washington can be more complicated in state agencies already juggling eligibility checks, provider screening and payment oversight.
That is the trade-off behind many anti-fraud bills. Tighter screening can protect money and beneficiaries, but it works best when it is precise enough not to slow legitimate providers or create new bottlenecks for care.
What happens next
Congress.gov lists H.R. 2309 as the Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act in the 119th Congress. The lawmakers’ announcement says a prior version passed the House by voice vote in the previous Congress, which suggests the concept has already cleared at least one political hurdle.
Passing a bill through one chamber, however, is not the same as enacting it. The measure would still need to move through the legislative process, including committee attention, House action and Senate consideration, unless it is folded into a larger health or government-efficiency package.
The unanswered question is not whether lawmakers oppose stopping dead-doctor billing. Few are likely to defend that. The question is whether this proposal becomes a standalone priority or one small piece of a bigger argument over health spending and fraud enforcement.
For now, the bill gives Republicans and Democrats a rare shared talking point: use an existing federal death database to prevent a specific type of Medicare and Medicaid abuse before taxpayer money leaves the system.
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