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\n \n Federal authorities on Thursday arrested eight people in and around Los Angeles in connection with various health care fraud schemes totaling $50 million.\n <\/p>\n \n Five of the cases involve hospice care centers in the Los Angeles area of \u200b\u200bGlendale, Artesia, Tarzana, and Simi Valley that are suspected of billing Medicare for patients who were terminally ill and ineligible for hospice services, the U.S. attorney’s office said. One person was arrested in Idaho and one in Los Angeles on suspicion of defrauding a West Coast union’s health insurance plan. He was also arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of falsifying immigration medical documents.\n <\/p>\n \n The Trump administration has made California, particularly the Los Angeles area, a focus of its national anti-fraud efforts, arguing that the Democratic-led state is failing to crack down on fraudulent spending.\n <\/p>\n \n Bill Esseri, the first assistant U.S. attorney appointed by President Trump, called California a “kingdom of fraud” at a press conference announcing the charges.\n <\/p>\n \n Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said the state is already aggressively cracking down on hospice fraud, noting that the governor signed legislation to stop issuing new hospice licenses in 2021 due to fraud concerns. The department also said the state has revoked more than 280 hospice licenses in two years and 300 providers are under investigation.\n <\/p>\n \n “I’m glad the federal government is finally doing its part,” Newsom wrote in a post about X.\n <\/p>\n \n The administration has highlighted fraud across the country in federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March establishing the Task Force on Fraud, led by Vice President J.D. Vance, and it met for the first time last week. Most of the effort has focused on Democratic-run states, but Republican-led Florida was among the states asked to share more information on how to identify, prevent and combat Medicaid fraud.\n <\/p>\n \n “We have a zero-tolerance policy toward criminals who defraud American taxpayers,” Ezeiri said in a statement announcing the California charges.\n <\/p>\n \n Dr. Mehmet Oz said at a news conference that federal authorities had “extracted” 221 hospices in the past 10 weeks. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which Oz runs, did not immediately respond to an email seeking more information about its contents. CMS certifies hospices that accept patients with government-subsidized health insurance.\n <\/p>\n \n “We’re going to look at every hospice in California,” Oz said.\n <\/p>\n \n In January, Oz posted a video on social media in front of an Armenian bakery in Los Angeles alleging that there was a roughly $3.5 billion hospice and home care fraud going on in the city, and that a “significant portion” of it was run by the “Russian Armenian Mafia.” This led to a civil rights lawsuit by Newsom’s office, which claimed that Oz targeted Armenians with “baseless racist allegations.”\n <\/p>\n \n The Oz agency also announced that it is proposing a new publicly available hospice scoring system using care metrics to better identify potentially illegal facilities.\n <\/p>\n \n The largest Medicare fraud case announced Thursday involves an Artesia-based hospice center whose owner submitted more than $9 million in fraudulent hospice claims to Medicare, and more than $8.5 million was paid on those claims, prosecutors said.\n <\/p>\n \n The owner paid beneficiaries and marketers for referring purported hospice patients to the company. Prosecutors said one couple was promised $300 a month to enroll in hospice care and received unnecessary items such as energy drinks, non-prescription vitamins and a wheelchair, even though they didn’t need it.\n <\/p>\n \n Another person charged in the new hospice fraud case was convicted in an earlier hospice fraud case in December 2024 and is currently serving a federal prison sentence in Seattle. Her husband was arrested Thursday morning as a co-defendant.\n <\/p>\n \n Authorities also announced charges against a Los Angeles nurse who used a Tarzana hospice center to file claims for more than $3.8 million, of which Medicare paid out about $3.4 million. She has not yet been arrested.\n <\/p>\n \n No trial date has been set, and it was not immediately clear whether any of those arrested had legal representation.\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #people #arrested #federal #crackdown #alleged #medical #fraud #Southern #California #CNN<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AP \u2014 Federal authorities on Thursday arrested eight people in and around Los Angeles in connection with various health care fraud schemes totaling $50 million. Five of the cases involve hospice care centers in the Los Angeles area of \u200b\u200bGlendale, Artesia, Tarzana, and Simi Valley that are suspected of billing Medicare for patients who were … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[1916,1240,985,1918,1915,734,1917,77,128,1302],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-health-care","tag-alleged","tag-arrested","tag-california","tag-cnn","tag-crackdown","tag-federal","tag-fraud","tag-medical","tag-people","tag-southern"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/golliza.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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