Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday that hospice fraud schemes operating across the Los Angeles area may have drained as much as $5 billion from federal coffers, a staggering figure that landed alongside his disclosure that the administration has already shuttered 500 hospice operations in the city without a single complaint from Congress or the public.
The exchange, prompted by Republican Texas Rep. Beth Van Duyne, laid bare a pattern that federal officials and independent journalists have been tracking for months: sham hospice companies registered at fake or shared addresses, billing Medicare for patients who were never dying and never receiving care. The dollar amounts Kennedy cited dwarf previous estimates and raise hard questions about how the fraud grew so large under prior administrations.
Van Duyne opened her line of questioning with a pointed callback. She told Kennedy she had asked the same question of his predecessor, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, and as the Daily Caller reported, the previous answer amounted to nothing.
"We had a previous secretary who I asked questions about what was going on with the waste, fraud and abuse, and I don't know if you recognize this, I asked Secretary Becerra the same question: What's going on at 14545 Friar Street in Van Nuys, California? Does that, does that ring a bell to you at all?"
Kennedy admitted it did not. "No, I, I, I could guess, why don't you tell me?" he replied. Van Duyne filled him in: more than 100 separate hospice licenses had been registered to that single Van Nuys address. When she had raised the issue with Becerra, she said, he did "basically nothing."
Kennedy walked the committee through the mechanics of the fraud in plain terms. Operators obtained patient identification, or simply bought it. They went into low-income neighborhoods and offered people flat-screen televisions and $600 cash in exchange for enrolling in a hospice program on paper. The federal government then paid the operators $6,000 per enrollee.
The patients, of course, were not terminally ill. Kennedy noted the tell with dry precision:
"The interesting thing is almost none of them ever died."
A typical hospice stay, Kennedy said, lasts about 18 days. These ghost patients "stayed forever. Nothing ever happened because they weren't actually there, they were just invented." The companies existed on paper, at fabricated or shared addresses, collecting federal reimbursements for care that never took place.
Kennedy identified the fraud networks as being run by "certain foreign communities," specifically citing Estonian and Armenian operators. He was careful to note that "there's an incredibly great Armenian community in Los Angeles and very few of them were involved in this," but added that those who were "were making hundreds of millions of dollars out of fraud and just stealing money from us."
Weeks before the hearing, Kennedy made similar claims on the Bossticks podcast, where he alleged the fraud was tied to organized crime. The New York Post reported that Kennedy said many of the sham hospices were "mainly operated by Russian mobsters" who charged the federal government for home-based end-of-life care that never happened. "These hospices have a hundred percent survival rate. Nobody ever dies," Kennedy said at the time.
President Donald Trump placed Vice President J.D. Vance in charge of a federal anti-fraud task force that held its first meeting on March 27. Since then, the task force has suspended federal funding to nearly 450 hospices suspected of fraud in the Los Angeles area. Kennedy told the committee the total number of shuttered hospices had reached 500.
Whether the "nearly 450" figure and the "500" figure refer to the same group of entities, or whether additional closures followed the initial suspensions, was not clarified during the hearing. What is clear is the scale: hundreds of operations, all in one metropolitan area, all apparently billing Medicare for services they never provided.
The crackdown has already produced arrests. AP News reported that federal officials arrested eight people in and around Los Angeles over alleged health care fraud schemes totaling $50 million. Five of those cases involved hospice centers that allegedly billed Medicare for patients who were not terminally ill and did not qualify for hospice services. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said the administration is "enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for criminals who defraud American taxpayers."
CMS head Dr. Mehmet Oz signaled the review would not stop at Los Angeles. "We're going to review every single hospice in California," he said.
House Oversight has also opened its own investigation into California hospice providers. Committee auditors estimated that LA County hospice providers overbilled Medicare by at least $105 million in a single year, a figure that, while large, represents only a fraction of Kennedy's $5 billion estimate for the total accumulated cost.
The Los Angeles hospice racket is not an isolated case. It fits into a widening picture of federal benefit fraud that has drawn increasing attention from Congress, the administration, and independent investigators over the past year.
In November, City Journal published a report detailing significant welfare fraud in Minnesota. Some federal officials now estimate that state's welfare fraud alone totals at least $9 billion. Kennedy's HHS has continued to uncover additional fraud in Minnesota as part of the broader crackdown.
Independent journalist Nick Shirley posted a video in December investigating allegedly fraudulent day-care centers run by Somali migrants. In March, Shirley turned his lens on reputed hospice companies in the Los Angeles area, publishing his findings on X. Whistleblower allegations of similar schemes have surfaced in Maine and Ohio. In Washington state, independent journalists are probing more than 500 suspicious day-care centers.
The common thread is straightforward: federal benefit programs designed to serve the vulnerable, the dying, the elderly, children in day care, have been exploited by organized fraud rings that treat government reimbursement as a cash machine. The operators set up shell entities, enroll phantom beneficiaries, and collect payments for services that exist only on billing forms.
Van Duyne's questioning carried an unmistakable subtext. She had flagged the 14545 Friar Street address, with its 100-plus hospice licenses stacked at a single location, to the previous HHS secretary. Kennedy, who has been characteristically blunt in his public appearances, did not pretend to have inherited a clean operation. But the contrast between the two administrations' responses was hard to miss.
Under Becerra, the answer to Van Duyne's question was, by her account, "basically nothing." Under Kennedy, 500 hospices have been shut down, funding has been suspended to hundreds more, arrests have been made, and the secretary sat before Congress and put a $5 billion price tag on the damage.
Kennedy did not detail the methodology behind his $5 billion estimate. That figure remains his assessment, not an audited total. But even the more conservative numbers, $105 million in overbilling in a single year from LA County alone, $50 million in fraud tied to eight arrests, hundreds of millions attributed to individual operators, suggest the true cost is enormous.
No criminal charges, civil cases, or broader arrest totals were disclosed during the hearing beyond what has already been announced. The full scope of the fraud, and the full accounting of who profited, remain open questions.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have been focused on other priorities, including threats to impeach the president if they retake the House. Kennedy noted in his testimony that since the 500 hospice shutdowns, "we haven't had one call from Congress or anybody else about complaining because clearly these were fraudulent."
That silence speaks volumes. When 500 hospice operations vanish overnight and not a single member of Congress picks up the phone to object, the fraud was not a secret. It was a tolerance.
The broader Kennedy family continues to make political waves in different directions. Nancy Pelosi recently moved to endorse Kennedy's nephew Jack Schlossberg in a Manhattan House primary, a reminder that the Kennedy name still cuts across partisan lines, even as RFK Jr. himself has become one of the administration's most aggressive fraud fighters.
Kennedy's $5 billion figure, if anywhere close to accurate, represents one of the largest single-program fraud totals ever disclosed to Congress. It also represents money taken directly from Medicare, a program that taxpayers fund and that millions of seniors depend on for legitimate end-of-life care.
Every dollar stolen by a ghost hospice in Van Nuys is a dollar unavailable for a real patient in a real bed. The people harmed are not abstractions. They are the elderly and the dying, the taxpayers who fund the system, and the legitimate hospice providers forced to compete with criminal enterprises billing from empty storefronts.
For years, the fraud grew while the people in charge looked the other way. Now someone is finally counting the cost, and the number has a lot of zeros.
