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A new investigation is adding to the growing mountain of evidence that a network of hundreds of hospices are 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.
Indications of fraud have not stopped and have actually grown in LA County according to CBS News.
Auditors estimated LA County hospices overbilled Medicare by $105 million in a single year.
Their analysis revealed that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in the county trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state.
The densest concentration of agencies in the county sits in a 3-mile radius along Van Nuys Boulevard; nearly 500 hospices operate in the area.
There are 137 hospices operating along Van Nuys Boulevard alone. More than half of them show signs the state has outlined as indicators of fraud according to the CBS report.
Most alarming — 89 companies are registered to a single building in Van Nuys.
Regulators visited multiple suites in that Van Nuys building between 2021 and 2025 and found deficiencies. Including, for instance, nearly 40 companies sharing key personnel, according to the analysis.
When a CBS correspondent visited one such office, no one was there and mail could be seen piled at the door.
A hospice industry insider provided the California Post with data detailing hundreds of suspicious hospices and home agencies across not just LA County, but the entire state, including addresses where multiple agencies are listed at the same location.
A Post investigation found the addresses include empty storefronts, an auto parts shop and other offices that are unoccupied, some for years. Others don’t appear to exist at all.
When a CBS correspondent visited one such office, no one was there and mail could be seen piled at the door.
CBS NewsDr. Ira Byock, one of the leading palliative care physicians in the country, told The Post the level of alleged fraud and the speed in which it had grown has ”completely overwhelmed” state and federal authorities tasked with dealing with it.
“There are roughly 7,000 hospice programs across the US. There are 91 in Florida, 39 in New York — and over 2,800 in California,” Dr. Byock said.
“Many of them have come into existence in California in the last four years,” he said, adding that “clearly some of these programs in Southern California are not legitimate at all and seem like vehicles for fraudulent billing [of] Medicare.”
None of the hospices flagged by CBS News turned up in California’s enforcement actions database.
Since 2022, when the state published its audit report, California’s Department of Public Health has issued enforcement actions against seven hospice facilities statewide — despite the state auditor warning that fraud was rampant.
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.
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