by Susan Quinn
Families who are going through the hospice experience — that is, a loved one has six months or less to live — have the added misfortune of being caught up in fraud investigations. California, by far, leads the country in hospice fraud numbers, and of course Gavin Newsom blames President Trump for these violations.
What makes the situation especially intriguing in California are the locations of these supposed businesses:
A new investigation is adding to the growing mountain of evidence that a network of hundreds of hospices is allegedly ripping off tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers across California.
And ground zero for the alleged fraud — a stretch of road in Van Nuys:
‘You can’t throw a rock without hitting [a] hospice,’ Sheila Clark, President and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association (CHAPCA), told CBS News.The new findings highlight what the California Post exclusively reported earlier this month, that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is now actively cutting off payments to suspicious operations across Los Angeles, which is home to almost half of America’s end-of-life care providers.
Even more absurd is that this is not a new discovery. Gov. Newsom’s administration identified the fraud five years ago, and some action was taken, but not nearly enough:
His office wrote on X: ‘Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law BANNING all new hospice licenses in 2021 to curb fraud. What’s Trump doing? Making it easier for scammers to steal taxpayer dollars!’
Newsom’s office also told Newsweek: ‘In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law banning ALL new hospice licenses. That moratorium is still in place—blocking bad actors from entering the system while the state tightens oversight of existing providers.’
(If anyone can tell me how President Trump is to blame, I’d be most grateful.)
Meanwhile, the California state administration response has been pathetically small, while the rip-off continues:
State attorney general Rob Bonta says his office has brought criminal fraud cases against more than 100 defendants in the hospice industry and about two dozen civil cases. But he acknowledged that more needs to be done.
‘We need to be responsive to the red flags and react to them, not just count them,’ Bonta told CBS. ‘Our main lane is the accountability side, the criminal investigations, the civil investigations. That’s after the damage is done though, unfortunately.’
A moratorium on issuing new hospice licenses in the state was recently extended through January 2027, because the state missed its deadline to enact new emergency regulations for hospices.
In spite of their investigations and the moratorium on new licenses, new hospices are still managing to get licensed in California:
Despite the statewide moratorium, a ProPublica 2024 report found that new hospices were still cropping up in California and receiving Medicare certification. In one instance, 15 new hospices received Medicare certification, all operating from the same two-story building in Los Angeles, according to a ProPublica.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shared these observations:
‘There is lots of action, it seems,’ Oz said in a You Tube video posted on Tuesday. ‘In this four-block area in Los Angeles, there are 42 hospices. So, either there are a lot of people dying here, or you’ve got fraudulent activity that is so good that everyone wants to get in on it. What we have learned is there is roughly $3.5 billion of fraud taking place here in Los Angeles in hospice and home care. It’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian-Armenian mafia.’
This situation is outrageous. Not only are the American people being cheated, but the hospice patients and their families are being caught up in this fraud and abused by the mismanagement and mistreatment from these criminals.
It’s time for California to get serious about treating its dying hospice patients.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.