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Empty storefronts. Facilities that don’t exist. Addresses purported to house a dozen hospices.
All billing the federal government –– primarily from California.
Signs of fraud don’t get much clearer than that.
Plaudits to Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Trump administration for moving to shut down the brazen grift.
Oz and his team have halted Medicare payments to sketchy hospice providers –– many in Los Angeles –– with Oz adding that “every single hospice in California is now under investigation.”
Good.
California officials, meanwhile, have dismissed evidence of rampant hospice fraud, called their own lax oversight stellar, and attacked Dr. Oz as racist for raising the issue.
Talk about falling short of the moment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats should drop the empty defenses, quit the finger-pointing, end the effort to gaslight Californians –– and join the fight against fraud.
Every Californian, regardless of position or political party, should be able to agree: Prosecutors need to stop those who bill taxpayers for hospice services never rendered.
The transgressors should face consequences, not enjoy a complimentary de facto defense team in the form of the governor and his allies.
And taxpayers deserve protection and restitution, not dismissal from a governor consumed by anti-Trumpism and his own presidential ambition.
Newsom claimed in January that his team “identified and cracked down on hospice fraud for years, taking real action to protect patients and taxpayers.”
If that were true –– or if such efforts were effective –– why did a California Post investigation just find glaring signs of rampant fraud, from vacant buildings billing Medicare to multiple hospices claiming to operate from a single address?
Ira Byock, a top palliative care physician based in Torrance, Calif., told our reporter that apparent hospice fraud has surged in recent years.
“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,” Byock said.
So much for Newsom’s crackdown.
Rather than checking the numbers, the governor ridiculed the messenger.
“Amazing to watch Dr. Oz cosplay as a fraud fighter,” Newsom’s press office posted on X in January, alleging adding while California was engaged in a hospice-fraud crackdown, Oz “was busy pitching ‘miracle’ horse supplements to insomniacs on late-night TV.”
It does make one wonder which of the two is a pitchman, and which a fraud fighter.
And finally, the governor trotted out racist tropes in a related meager effort to dismiss the fraud probe.
“Our office is reviewing reports that Dr. Mehmet Oz targeted the Armenian American community in Southern California recently — making racially charged claims of fraud outside Armenian owned businesses, including a popular bakery,” Newsom’s press office wrote on X in January.
Oh, please.
It’s not too late for the governor and his erstwhile allies to reverse course, concede the extent of the hospice-fraud racket, and join the the cause of rooting it out.
Californians, and taxpayers, should have a clear idea: Who is abiding –– even defending –– the fraud epidemic in California, and who is fighting it?