LOS ANGELES / CPAC — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz delivered a blistering exposé on hospice fraud Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, spotlighting Los Angeles County as the epicenter of what he called one of the largest Medicare scams in U.S. history.
Citing explosive new data, Dr. Oz revealed that Los Angeles County alone is home to nearly 2,000 Medicare-certified hospice facilities—roughly one-third of the entire national total—despite representing only a tiny fraction of Americans who actually require end-of-life care. “This isn’t about compassion,” Oz told the crowd. “This is about greed.”
A detailed CBS analysis identified more than 700 of those facilities with multiple red flags for fraud, including suspicious clusters of addresses in the same buildings and highly irregular billing patterns. Investigators say the scheme is simple but devastating: operators enroll healthy, non-terminal patients into hospice programs solely to collect the average $200-per-day Medicare reimbursement—payments that continue for months or even years with little oversight.
The Trump administration has already moved aggressively to shut down the abuse. Officials announced the immediate suspension of payments to 70 high-risk hospice providers in the county. At the same time, the White House launched a new interagency task force led by Vice President JD Vance to root out fraud nationwide and protect seniors from predatory operators.
Republican lawmakers have opened a formal congressional probe, estimating that Los Angeles County alone has lost at least $3.5 billion to hospice fraud in recent years. State officials in California have taken parallel action, revoking more than 280 hospice licenses since 2022.
Dr. Oz, a physician and longtime advocate for Medicare integrity, framed the scandal as a direct threat to the program’s solvency and to the dignity of genuinely terminally ill Americans. “Every dollar stolen from hospice is a dollar taken from a patient who actually needs it,” he said. “We are ending this racket now.”
The revelations come as federal investigators continue to examine how such an outsized concentration of hospice providers could exist in a single county with no corresponding spike in terminal illness rates. The new task force is expected to deliver its first findings within 90 days, with additional enforcement actions anticipated in the coming weeks.
