A congressional letter says the governor’s administration knew for years about warning signs in Los Angeles County, while California says it has already spent years revoking licenses and building a fraud task force.
WASHINGTON, DC — House Republicans have opened an investigation into California hospice fraud, saying a whistleblower alleged Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration knew about major warning signs for years as federal officials and state auditors flagged suspicious billing, clustering of providers and possible abuse in Los Angeles County.
The dispute matters now because it has moved from media reports and state audits into a formal congressional records fight. Lawmakers on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are demanding documents from Newsom’s office after citing years of fraud indicators in California’s hospice system. California, meanwhile, says the state has not ignored the problem and has already imposed a moratorium on new hospice licenses, revoked hundreds of licenses and opened hundreds more cases as part of a long-running crackdown.
The latest phase began March 23, when Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and other Republican committee leaders sent Newsom a letter requesting records tied to hospice oversight from Jan. 1, 2019, to the present. The lawmakers said California had been aware of “credible reports of hospice fraud” for at least four years and had still failed to stop providers from exploiting patients and taxpayers. The letter drew heavily on a 2022 California state audit and on more recent reporting about Los Angeles County, where hospice growth far outpaced the elderly population. The committee gave the governor’s office until April 6 to turn over communications involving the governor and several state agencies responsible for licensing, investigations, payment oversight and enforcement.
The allegations in the letter are sweeping, but they are still allegations. Lawmakers pointed to a whistleblower account that said California had weak safeguards for screening hospice applicants and that bad actors could get licenses with limited checks. The same account, as described in the committee letter, said fraud rings recruited seniors into hospice programs, used kickbacks and moved enrollees between providers to keep billing going. The committee also cited cases in which patients reportedly did not realize they had been enrolled in hospice until they later sought Medicare coverage. Those claims have raised the stakes because hospice care is intended for terminally ill patients with a life expectancy of about six months, and improper enrollment can affect both medical treatment and public spending. So far, the congressional letter lays out the accusations, but it does not itself prove that Newsom personally knew of or approved any fraudulent scheme.
The strongest documented record in the dispute comes from the California State Auditor’s March 2022 report. Auditors found Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice agencies since 2010 and had far more providers than expected for the size of its older population. The report said the pattern suggested large-scale fraud and abuse, including likely fraudulent billing to Medicare and Medi-Cal and the apparent use of stolen identities of medical personnel to obtain licenses. Auditors also found suspiciously high live-discharge rates, long lengths of service and dense clusters of providers in certain communities. In one finding that has been repeated by both critics and defenders of the current probe, the audit estimated Los Angeles County hospice agencies likely overbilled Medicare by $105 million in 2019 alone, with at least another $3.1 million in likely Medi-Cal overbilling identified in state data.
Recent reporting added new fuel. A CBS News analysis of records for every hospice operating in Los Angeles County found that more than 700 of roughly 1,800 hospices triggered multiple fraud indicators identified by the state. House Republicans then used those findings to argue that California’s oversight structure was still not catching bad actors fast enough. The same committee letter also cited claims that some providers were packed into the same addresses, that some billed at unusually high levels and that one doctor’s Medicare provider number had allegedly been used across multiple hospices for tens of thousands of claims. Some of those details come from media reporting and lawmakers’ summaries of evidence, not from final court findings. That leaves several key questions unresolved, including how many suspicious cases will hold up in criminal or civil proceedings and what records may show about who inside state government knew what, and when.
California officials say the state has not been standing still. In a statement posted by the governor’s office a day after the House letter became public, Newsom said California had spent years building a broad hospice fraud enforcement effort. The administration said the state’s task force, moratorium on new hospice licenses and coordinated work by public health, health care and justice agencies had already produced results. According to the governor’s office, more than 280 hospice licenses have been revoked in the past two years, about 300 additional providers are being evaluated for revocation, and 284 criminal defendants have been arrested in hospice-related work since the broader enforcement push began. The administration also argues that Medicare is a federal program and says many of the billing allegations center on federal oversight as much as state action.
The politics around the case have become sharper since earlier clashes between California and the Trump administration. In January, Newsom’s office filed a civil rights complaint against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz after he publicly claimed that roughly $3.5 billion in hospice and home care fraud had taken place in Los Angeles and linked much of it to an ethnic criminal network. Newsom’s office called that language baseless and racially charged. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has separately said hospice fraud in Los Angeles is an “epidemic,” but state leaders have argued that acknowledging the fraud problem is different from accepting broad political claims that the state did nothing. That split now sits at the center of the House inquiry: Republicans say the state knew and failed to act, while California says it knew, acted and is still acting.
For families, providers and patients, the story is not only about government records. It is also about trust in end-of-life care. Legitimate hospice operators in Southern California have said fraudulent providers damage the field by crowding markets, distorting referrals and making it harder for patients to tell real care from paper operations. Investigative reports have described office buildings with unusually large numbers of hospice listings and beneficiaries who appeared to be enrolled despite not being terminally ill. Those details have made the case vivid beyond the political fight in Washington and Sacramento. They also explain why the issue keeps drawing national attention: every questionable claim involves public money, but every questionable enrollment can also touch a person near the end of life, or a family trying to understand what kind of care was actually ordered.
Where the matter stands now is procedural but significant. The House committee has demanded records by April 6 and may use whatever it receives to decide whether to expand hearings or seek more testimony. California has answered in public by highlighting revocations, arrests and its licensing moratorium, but the core question in the whistleblower claim — what Newsom and his office specifically knew about the alleged fraud, and at what point — remains unsettled.
Author note: Last updated March 26, 2026.