LA County is 'Ground Zero' for Hospice Fraudhttps://hotair.com/john-s-2/2026/03/10/la-county-is-ground-zero-for-hospice-fraud-n3812722David mentioned this topic earlier but I wanted to drill down on the issue of hospice fraud. LA County is the capital of this type of fraud and despite state efforts to get it under control, CBS News investigated and found that things have only gotten worse.
At age 69, Lynn Ianni is a pickleball whiz, zipping from dinks to drives energetically. When she suffered an injury on the court two years ago, she sought physical therapy, and was surprised to learn her Medicare insurance wouldn’t cover it...
“They said, ‘you're in hospice.’ And I said, ‘what? What are you talking about?” Ianni said. “‘Are you kidding me? Do I look like I’m in hospice?’”
Ianni’s Medicare number had been stolen, and used by a company to fraudulently enroll her in hospice – specialized, compassionate care for terminal patients nearing the end of their lives.
Medicare pays the states for hospice care for end-of-life patients, but the states are responsible for issuing the licenses that allow various providers to operate. Fraudsters seem to have realized this is an easy way to steal government money in California.
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The raw numbers are pretty striking. In 2010, LA County had 109 licensed hospice agencies serving a population of about 1 million elderly people. In 2021 the number of elderly people in the county had increased to 1.4 million but the number of agencies when from 109 to 1,841. And the report indicated the number of new applications kept climbing.
Public Health continues to be flooded with thousands of applications for additional hospice agencies, with the majority coming from Los Angeles County. From 2001 through 2018, Public Health data show it received nearly 1,700 applications for new hospice licenses. However, from just January 2019 to August 2021, Public Health received more than 3,500 licensing applications for new hospice agencies, more than double the number it received in the previous 18 years. More than 2,600, or about 75 percent, of these new hospice applications were for locations in Los Angeles County.
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CBS did what California won't and actually went to one of the businesses that triggered all of the red flags for fraud. It was immediately obvious this was a fake hospice which seems to have transferred its "patients" to another bogus hospice next door.
Data for one agency, VML, triggered all six state fraud indicators in CBS News’ review, while billing roughly $49,000 per patient, which is about three-and-a-half times the national average. It shares a building with other hospices, and its key personnel overlap with multiple companies.
When CBS News visited the office building where VML was located, it appeared no one was in. Mail could be seen piled at the door...
Right next door was World Health Hospice, Inc., another hospice that triggered five of six state indicators of potential fraud, based on the state’s definitions. When CBS News visited that neighboring hospice office, no one answered the door. Phone calls went unanswered and messages couldn’t be left, because its voicemail had not been set up. That agency had been in operation since 2021, according to state records.
Previous post about this,
https://conservativecave.com/cave/index.php?topic=138426.msg1573129#msg1573129 .
This is a situation where authority is divided - the Feds set the rules for patient qualification and care, and handle the claims. But it is states who license organizations that provide care. While there are hospices that are their own facility, there are hospice organizations that provide all care either in patients' homes or in assisted living or skilled nursing facilities (for example, Sutter Health Foundation in noth central California has several such hospices).
When there is fraud, it is the Feds who eventually detect it, but by the time the Feds act, the fraudsters have collected a lot of $$$$ fraudulently, and if they "need" to, just get a new license from rubber-stamp state bureaucrats. That this is concentrated in LA County suggests there is an organized or informally networked group/community exploiting lax state oversight.
