Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a House committee Thursday that the total cost of hospice fraud in Los Angeles could reach $5,000,000,000.
Independent journalist Nick Shirley, who posted a video in December showing him investigating allegedly fraudulent day care centers run by Somali migrants, posted a similar video looking into reputed hospice companies in the Los Angeles area in March. Republican Texas Rep. Beth Van Duyne asked Kennedy about the reported fraud during a hearing held by the House Ways and Means Committee.
“We had a previous secretary who I asked questions about what was going on with the waste, fraud and abuse, and I don’t know if you recognize this, I asked Secretary Becerra the same question: What’s going on at 14545 Friar Street in Van Nuys, California? Does that, does that ring a bell to you at all?” Van Duyne asked Kennedy, who responded, “No, I, I, I could guess, why don’t you tell me?”
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“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,” Van Duyne replied. “Can you walk through what your office is actually doing on the waste, fraud, and abuse?”
President Donald Trump placed Vice President J.D. Vance in charge of an anti-fraud task force which first met on March 27. The task force suspended federal funding to nearly 450 hospices suspected of fraud in the Los Angeles area.
“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,” Kennedy explained. “It would obtain patient identification or they would pay people, they were going and giving people in poor neighborhoods flat screen televisions, $600 and then they would enlist them and enroll them in the hospice and we were paying them $6000, and the interesting thing is almost none of them ever died.”
“Typically, the stay in a hospice is about 18 days, these people stayed forever. Nothing ever happened because they weren’t actually there, they were just invented,” Kennedy continued. “And it was operated by certain, foreign communities, a lot of Estonians and a lot of Armenians, and there’s an incredibly great Armenian community in Los Angeles and very few of them were involved in this, but the ones that were, were making hundreds of millions of dollars out of fraud and just stealing money from us. I think the cost has been about $5,000,000,000.”
City Journal published a report in November detailing significant welfare fraud in Minnesota, much of it perpetrated by Somali migrants, which some federal officials estimate to total at least $9 billion.
Whistleblowers in Maine and Ohio have alleged that similar schemes by Somali scammers have taken place in those states, while over 500 suspicious day-care centers are being probed by independent journalists in Washington state, which is considering legislation to mask information about child-care establishments.
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