Before dawn on Thursday, FBI SWAT agents sawed through the metal front gate of a San Dimas, California, home and called out over loudspeakers for the occupants to surrender. Inside were Gladwin Gill, 66, a licensed psychologist, and his wife Amelou Gill, 70, a registered nurse — the couple behind St. Francis Palliative Care, a hospice in Glendale. What made the arrest especially striking was a single statistic buried in federal billing data: over a five-year period, their hospice reported a patient mortality rate of just 2.3%. In a facility built around caring for the dying, 97 out of every 100 patients were surviving. That number, federal prosecutors now allege, was not a medical miracle. It was evidence of fraud.
The early-morning raid was not an isolated enforcement action. It was the opening act of a sweeping federal crackdown on hospice fraud across Southern California — one that resulted in 15 defendants facing federal charges on Thursday alone, with more expected to follow. CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was present at the scene, told reporters that federal regulators had suspended “hundreds” of hospice licenses in California by day’s end. The operation was conducted in coordination with Vice President JD Vance’s Fraud Taskforce, the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health and Human Services.