Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday that hospice fraud in the Los Angeles area has cost the federal government an estimated $5 billion, a figure he delivered while describing a scheme built on fake addresses, recruited patients, and phantom care that nobody in the previous administration bothered to stop.
The exchange, reported by the Daily Caller, came during questioning by Republican Texas Rep. Beth Van Duyne, who had raised the same issue with Kennedy's predecessor and gotten nowhere.
Kennedy's testimony laid out a fraud operation that is staggering in its simplicity. Operators set up hospice companies at invented addresses. They went into low-income neighborhoods and paid residents flat-screen televisions and $600 cash to hand over their personal identification. Those residents were then enrolled as hospice patients, on paper. The federal government paid $6,000 per enrollee. And almost none of the "patients" ever died, because they were never actually receiving end-of-life care.
Van Duyne opened the exchange by asking Kennedy whether a specific address meant anything to him: 14545 Friar Street in Van Nuys, California. It didn't. She told him why it should.
"We had over 100 different licenses for hospices, yep, right at this address, and we asked him what he was doing about it, basically nothing."
The "him" was former HHS Secretary Becerra, whom Van Duyne said she had pressed on the same waste, fraud, and abuse during the prior administration. Her account of that exchange was blunt: she got nothing.
Van Duyne then asked Kennedy to walk through what his office was actually doing. His answer was direct. Kennedy said the department had already shut down 500 hospices in Los Angeles. He added a detail that speaks for itself: not a single member of Congress or anyone else had called to complain about the closures.
"We've already shut down 500 hospices and Los Angeles, and incidentally, we haven't had one call from Congress or anybody else about complaining because clearly these were fraudulent. A lot of these places, like you say, they'd have, they were just invented addresses."
No complaints. No constituents calling their representatives to say a real hospice they relied on had been wrongly shuttered. That silence tells you everything about how real these operations were.
Kennedy described the mechanics in plain terms. A typical hospice stay lasts about 18 days. The patients enrolled through these fraudulent companies stayed indefinitely. Nothing ever happened to them, no decline, no treatment, no death, because they were never actually there. They were names on a form, recruited with a television and a few hundred dollars, generating thousands in federal payments per head.
Kennedy told the committee the scheme was "operated by certain foreign communities," specifying Estonians and Armenians. He was careful to note that the broader Armenian community in Los Angeles is "incredibly great" and that "very few of them were involved." But the ones who were, he said, were "making hundreds of millions of dollars out of fraud and just stealing money from us."
His bottom-line estimate: roughly $5 billion.
The closures Kennedy described are part of a broader anti-fraud push. President Donald Trump placed Vice President J.D. Vance in charge of an anti-fraud task force that held its first meeting on March 27. That task force suspended federal funding to nearly 450 hospices suspected of fraud in the Los Angeles area alone.
Whether the 450 suspended hospices and the 500 Kennedy said were shut down represent overlapping or distinct sets was not clarified during the hearing. But either number, or a combination, points to the same conclusion: Los Angeles had become a hub for industrial-scale hospice fraud, and the federal government kept writing checks.
The question that hangs over the testimony is not whether the fraud existed. It's how it grew this large without the previous administration acting on it. Van Duyne's account suggests the answer is straightforward: she raised the alarm, and the prior HHS secretary did "basically nothing."
Los Angeles hospice fraud is not an isolated case. It fits a widening pattern of welfare and benefits fraud that independent journalists and federal investigators have been uncovering across the country.
Independent journalist Nick Shirley posted a video in December showing his investigation into allegedly fraudulent day-care centers run by Somali migrants. In March, he posted a similar video looking into reputed hospice companies in the Los Angeles area. California's governor's office has previously mocked independent journalists who exposed alleged government fraud rather than addressing the substance of their findings.
City Journal published a report in November detailing significant welfare fraud in Minnesota, where some federal officials estimated losses totaled at least $9 billion. Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rick Scott have since introduced legislation to end the prepayment rules that allowed that fraud to flourish.
Whistleblowers have reportedly described similar schemes operating in Maine and Ohio. In Washington state, independent journalists are probing over 500 suspicious day-care centers. The geography keeps expanding. The dollar figures keep climbing.
The common thread is a federal payment system designed on the honor principle, send money first, verify later, and hope nobody notices when verification never comes. Fraudsters noticed. They exploited it from coast to coast, enrolling phantom beneficiaries in programs meant for the dying, the young, and the vulnerable.
Kennedy's most telling detail was not the $5 billion figure. It was the absence of protest. Five hundred hospice closures in a single metropolitan area, and not one phone call from a patient, a family, or a lawmaker saying a legitimate provider had been wrongly targeted.
That silence is the audit. It tells you these were not borderline cases or paperwork disputes. They were empty storefronts and invented addresses billing the federal treasury for patients who were never sick and care that was never delivered.
Van Duyne asked the right question years ago. The prior administration's answer was inaction. Kennedy's answer, whatever its imperfections, has been to shut the operations down and cut the funding. The contrast is not subtle.
The open questions remain serious. Kennedy did not detail the evidence behind his $5 billion estimate. The specific entities and individuals behind the nearly 450 suspended hospices have not been publicly identified. Whether criminal referrals or prosecutions will follow the closures is unclear. Taxpayers deserve answers on all of it.
But the first step in stopping a $5 billion theft is admitting it's happening. The last administration couldn't manage even that. Some officials would rather file complaints against the people trying to fix the problem than confront the fraud itself.
When you can stack a hundred hospice licenses at a single address in Van Nuys and nobody in Washington blinks, the system isn't broken. It's working exactly the way the fraudsters need it to.