Federal prosecutors have charged 15 people — doctors and nurses included — with running a $50 million hospice fraud scheme in California. Investigators say the operation recruited vulnerable people, coached them to pose as terminally ill, and billed Medicare for care they never legitimately needed.
Now, a new question: did state officials help it happen? Eric Eggers, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute, says California had the manpower to catch this — and didn’t.
“If any state was equipped to be able to tackle this, California certainly fits the bill,” Eggers said. “There’s some new reporting out that their state employee rolls have actually gone up by 25% over the last decade, and their spending has gone up by 50%, while the population increased less than 1%. So they certainly have the manpower to do so.”
So why didn’t they? Eggers is blunt.
“What they lack is the political will. And that’s because, as we saw in Minnesota, you don’t get elected statewide by going after reliable voting blocs. California fraud dwarfs Minnesota fraud. That’s a national scandal. And you heard Dr. Oz talk about the fact that the federal government is actually going after it. That’s actually why you’re seeing some of this happen right now.”
Eggers traces the rot back to a December 2024 Biden administration directive instructing states not to remove suspected Medicaid fraud cases from the rolls — effectively giving cover to fraudsters in Democrat-governed states.
“It just shows you what a 180-degree shift it’s been since the Biden administration. In December of 2024, a Biden administration official sent out a letter saying, ‘Hey, states, we don’t care if you think they are committing Medicaid fraud. Do not remove them from the rolls.’ So this was something that was allowed to exist in states governed by Democrats, and certainly was allowed to exist under Joe Biden in a very real way. And we’re just now realizing how widespread this problem is.”
The numbers back him up. Roughly one-third of all hospice facilities in the United States are located in Los Angeles. The state has seen a sevenfold increase in hospice centers over just five years — with no corresponding rise in deaths.
For Eggers, that’s not a coincidence. It’s a tell.
Watch the clip above.
