The federal government keeps a public list of every provider barred from billing Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs. We pulled the entire HHS-OIG exclusion list — 83,665 records — and counted what's actually in it. No names here, just the shape of the whole.
To be "excluded" means federal health programs will not pay for anything you provide, order, or prescribe — a career-ending sanction. 80,233 of the 83,665 are individual people; the remaining 3,432 are businesses and facilities.
Exclusions cluster in the biggest states, but not purely by population — California and Florida together account for nearly a quarter of the entire national list.
One role dominates everything else. Nurses and nurse aides make up 34,663 exclusions — more than four in ten — dwarfing every physician, pharmacist, and business category combined.
The skew is structural: nursing and aide roles are the largest health workforce in the country and are licensed by every state, so a state license action flows straight onto the federal list.
Each exclusion carries a statutory code from Section 1128 of the Social Security Act. Two authorities account for more than 70% of the entire list — a lost license, or a program-related criminal conviction.
The list is not shrinking. Federal enforcement adds roughly 2,000–3,000 exclusions in a typical year, with no sign of slowing.
* 2026 is a partial year (data pulled mid-year). Counts reflect the year an exclusion was added for providers who are still excluded today; reinstated providers drop off the list, which lightly deflates older years.
Hiring a provider, credentialing a vendor, or auditing a network? Every organization that bills federal health programs is required to check that its people and partners aren't on this list. Our tool screens any name or NPI against the full, up-to-date federal exclusion set — or pulls exclusions filtered by state, specialty, and type.
Screen against the LEIE exclusion list →