The hearing room exchange began with a specific address and widened into a sprawling allegation about fraud, oversight, and the scale of federal healthcare spending.
At a House Ways and Means Committee session on Thursday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was pressed by Republican Rep. Beth Van Duyne about irregularities tied to hospice operations in Los Angeles—an issue that, by the end of the discussion, was framed as potentially costing billions.
Van Duyne pointed to a single location in Van Nuys—14545 Friar Street—describing it as the registered address for more than 100 hospice licenses. She noted that the same question had previously been raised with former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, with little apparent follow-up at the time.
Kennedy, hearing the address for the first time, asked for clarification, prompting Van Duyne to outline what she characterized as a pattern of inaction amid mounting signs of abuse.
Kennedy’s response shifted the scope. He described an aggressive federal crackdown already underway, tied to a task force established under the Trump administration and led by Vice President J.D. Vance.
According to Kennedy, hundreds of hospice entities in the Los Angeles area have already been shut down or stripped of funding. He cited figures suggesting roughly 500 closures and emphasized that many of the operations appeared to exist only on paper, using fabricated addresses or minimal physical presence.
The mechanics he described were straightforward and costly. Individuals—often in lower-income neighborhoods—were allegedly offered incentives such as cash or consumer goods in exchange for enrolling in hospice programs. Once enrolled, providers could bill the government thousands of dollars per patient.
Kennedy noted that typical hospice stays last just over two weeks, yet in these cases, patients remained enrolled indefinitely, with no corresponding medical outcomes. “Almost none of them ever died,” he said, underscoring the disconnect between billing and care.
He also addressed the question of who was running these operations, referencing involvement from certain foreign-linked networks while cautioning that broader communities were not implicated. The distinction appeared aimed at separating specific alleged actors from larger immigrant populations in the region.
The financial scope remains a central point of contention. Kennedy estimated the cost of the Los Angeles hospice fraud alone could reach $5 billion, a figure that, if substantiated, would rank among the more significant healthcare fraud cases in recent years.
