Somewhere in Los Angeles, a hospice opened its doors, hung out its shingle, and forgot the one thing a hospice is supposed to have.
The Justice Department announced charges on October 22 against 15 defendants, including six medical professionals, in a Los Angeles health-care fraud takedown it says involved over $1.8 billion in fraudulent claims. The takedown's parts: over $1.6 billion billed in a scheme to lure vulnerable people to California for sham substance-abuse treatment, $134 million billed to Medicare for unnecessary atherectomy procedures, and over $138 million billed to Medicare across three different hospice fraud schemes where the patients were not terminally ill.
Read that last part again. Hospice care is for people who are dying. These schemes billed for it anyway.
The hospices had no patients. The bills had everything else. Medicare's newest wellness plan: zero patients, maximum billing.
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The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But the business model, as alleged, is a masterpiece of modern efficiency: skip the hard part — the patients — and go straight to the invoicing.
The underlying reporting is filed in the Evidence Locker: U.S. Department of Justice (Oct. 22, 2026).
