CBS News Investigation Uncovers Massive Medicare Hospice Fraud In L.A. County

Original article here

An investigation by CBS News has discovered massive Medicare fraud at more than 700 out of 1,800 licensed hospice providers in Los Angeles County.

The scam utilizes stolen Medicare numbers to fraudulently enroll healthy seniors in hospice with fake terminal diagnoses, billing Medicare an average of $29,000 per patient without delivering care, to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

About 31 percent of hospice and home health companies in the U.S. are registered in L.A. County but when investigators visited the addresses listed, they found no clinics, patients or healthcare workers.

Instead they found multiple red flags, including multiple hospices in one building, high rates of terminally ill patients later discharged alive, excessive billing, and staff shared across multiple companies.

The California state auditor had sounded the alarm three years ago, saying that Los Angeles County had seen the number of hospice companies increase more than six times the national average, relative to its elderly population.

Let’s put this in perspective. The population of residents age 65 or over in California is estimated at 6.3 million while Florida estimates its population of 65+ residents at 4.9 million.

Public records show 2,279 Medicare-certified hospice organizations in California with just 208 such Medicare-certified organizations in Florida.

This raises serious questions as to why California would have more than 10 times the number of Medicare-certified hospice organizations than Florida when it has less than twice the population of 65+ residents.

According to CBS, in just one year, L.A. County hospices overbilled Medicare by $105 million, prompting the state to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices.

This latest revelation of potential Medicare fraud shows that the problem of scammers enriching themselves at taxpayer expense extends far beyond Minnesota, which has been under scrutiny for the past few months over the alleged theft of billions of taxpayer dollars via social services.

It also reveals the silver lining that a mainstream news organization is finally willing to do investigative reporting on suspected fraud rather than leaving the heavy lifting to citizen journalists like Nick Shirley, who blew the lid off taxpayer fraud in Minnesota and then turned his sights on California.