California says it cracked down on hospice fraud under Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Yet in Van Nuys, 197 hospice agencies are registered to a single address.
Republican Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo (AD33) didn’t just find it on paper. After tracing the agencies to 14545 Friar St. through state licensing records, she went to the property herself to see what was actually there.
The site did not look like the kind of place that should serve as the listed home for nearly 200 end-of-life care providers.
Macedo found a property that appeared dilapidated, lacked basic accessibility features, and showed no obvious signs of hospice activity. Many of the phone numbers tied to the listed agencies did not work, went unanswered, or ended with people hanging up when called.
California’s hospice system has generated fraud warnings for years, and Los Angeles County has been at the center of them. Those warnings continued during Newsom’s administration, even as the state said it was addressing the problem. As noted in a RedState report last Wednesday, the warning signs were already hard to miss:
“More than 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospice agencies in Los Angeles County had two or more indicators commonly associated with fraud… raising concerns about whether some providers are exploiting the system.”
That earlier reporting also showed auditors found Los Angeles hospice providers overbilled Medicare by about $105 million between 2017 and 2019, while overlapping addresses, administrators, and medical directors kept surfacing in state records. Those findings were handed to the state with recommendations meant to stop exactly this.