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.
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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.
Macedo’s finding puts a specific address on that broader pattern. The building had a “Medical Plaza” sign, but Macedo said she did not see the kind of activity you would expect at a legitimate medical facility handling fragile patients and their families.
“No patient, by the way,” she said. “I did not see a single person coming in or out of the building, or doctors or nurses or anything like that.”
California says it tightened oversight. In Van Nuys, 197 agencies are tied to a single address.
Macedo and several Republican lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Newsom urging him to adopt emergency regulations recommended by a 2022 state audit aimed at preventing hospice licensing fraud. They pointed to roughly 2,100 complaints filed between January 2015 and August 2021, including nearly 350 alleging fraud or abuse, and cited audit findings suggesting organized networks in Los Angeles County may have been defrauding Medicare and Medi-Cal hospice programs.
The most damning part of the letter is how directly it frames the state’s inaction.
“It has been four years since the audit report; your Administration has failed to protect families in the most difficult moment of their lives,” the lawmakers wrote. “Most people have never had to choose hospice before; they do not know what questions to ask, what warning signs to look for, or who to trust. That is why state oversight matters, and right now the system is broken.”
The governor’s office points to prior enforcement actions, including a moratorium on new hospice licenses and a multi-agency task force focused on fraud. A moratorium does not explain how nearly 200 agencies were already tied to one address. A task force does not explain why those agencies remained active long enough to be found.
California says it cracked down on hospice fraud under Newsom. After years of audits, complaints, and warnings, 197 agencies are still tied to one address in Van Nuys.
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