Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is warning that a sweeping fraud operation centered in Los Angeles may have cost taxpayers billions, as federal officials move aggressively to shut down suspect hospice providers.
Testifying before Congress, Kennedy said the scale of abuse could reach as high as $5 billion, pointing to a network of operations that allegedly enrolled individuals into hospice care who were not terminally ill.
The issue surfaced during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing, where lawmakers pressed the administration on what they described as widespread waste, fraud and abuse within the system. The concerns follow independent investigations highlighting suspicious clusters of hospice licenses operating out of shared or questionable addresses.
On March 17th, as WorldNetDaily reported, Nick Shirley expressed these concerns while documenting activity in California.
Standing behind a luxury BMW he purported was purchased through fraud, he said, “This is the sound of hospice money” as the engine revved.
“We’ve already shut down 500 hospices and Los Angeles, and incidentally, we haven’t had one call from Congress or anybody else about complaining because clearly these were fraudulent. A lot of these places, like you say, they’d have, they were just invented addresses,” Kennedy explained. “It would obtain patient identification or they would pay people, they were going and giving people in poor neighborhoods flat screen televisions, $600 and then they would enlist them and enroll them in the hospice and we were paying them $6,000, and the interesting thing is almost none of them ever died.”
“Typically, the stay in a hospice is about 18 days, these people stayed forever. Nothing ever happened because they weren’t actually there, they were just invented,” Kennedy continued. “And it was operated by certain, foreign communities, a lot of Estonians and a lot of Armenians, and there’s an incredibly great Armenian community in Los Angeles and very few of them were involved in this, but the ones that were, were making hundreds of millions of dollars out of fraud and just stealing money from us. I think the cost has been about $5,000,000,000.”
The crackdown is part of a broader federal initiative targeting healthcare fraud nationwide. A task force established under the Trump administration has already moved to suspend funding for hundreds of providers while investigations continue into the full scope of the activity.
Authorities say the Los Angeles cases may reflect a larger pattern of organized fraud tied to licensing loopholes and weak oversight, with some operations allegedly generating hundreds of millions of dollars through false claims.
The situation is also drawing attention to similar allegations in other states, where whistleblowers and investigators have reported comparable schemes involving government-funded programs.
As federal agencies continue to audit providers and pursue enforcement actions, the outcome could reshape oversight of hospice care and expose vulnerabilities in how taxpayer-funded healthcare programs are administered.
