We visited “ground zero” for hospice fraud: Los Angeles, California

At age 69, Lynn Ianni is a pickleball whiz, zipping from dinks to drives energetically. When she suffered an injury on the court two years ago, she sought physical therapy, and was surprised to learn her Medicare insurance wouldn’t cover it.

“They said, ‘you're in hospice.’ And I said, ‘what? What are you talking about?” Ianni said. “‘Are you kidding me? Do I look like I’m in hospice?’”

Ianni’s Medicare number had been stolen, and used by a company to fraudulently enroll her in hospice – specialized, compassionate care for terminal patients nearing the end of their lives. It was another example of fraud in the hospice industry, long a nationwide problem. But her case arose well after officials had promised to stamp it out in California, where the problem has been especially acute.

Three years ago, California’s state auditor sounded the alarm that Los Angeles County had seen a 1,500% increase in hospice companies since 2010 – more than six times the national average relative to its elderly population.

Auditors estimated LA County hospices overbilled Medicare by $105 million in a single year. The report called out notable red flags – key warning signs of fraud:

The state says it proceeded to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices.

The CBS News analysis reveals that over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County, trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state.

Too many people benefit from the fraud, including a whole lot of elected officials. Hard to imagine how many pockets can be comfortably lined with millions of fraud dollars. Hope President Trump turns his full attention to this matter once he reduces Iran and Cuba to rubble.

Bingo!

A private company would be charged with fraud if their books operated the way our federal agencies do. Expenses are not tracked; requests for funds are not verified; and money just goes out the door to whoever requests it.

For instance from this story yesterday:

“When the District of Columbia’s city government proposed its broadband expansion plan to the Trump administration, it sought nearly $4 million to connect 55 physical addresses—about $70,000 per location—in one of the most broadband-saturated cities in America.

[snip]

We told local broadband officials last August that the costs were unjustifiable. We directed them to redo their proposal and come back to us with a plan that made fiscal sense. Days later, the office gave us a plan involving the same provider, same technology and same locations. But the price had dropped by more than 90%—to about $6,000 per location.

That raised new questions. How does a $70,000 bid drop to $6,000 with no material changes? Did these locations require federal funding at all? These concerns weren’t hypothetical; D.C. has a history of questionable broadband mapping. The Senate Commerce Committee’s 2023 Red Light Report found that 58 of 184 supposedly unserved D.C. locations were inside the National Zoo—including Lion-Tiger Hill and the Butterfly Garden. When a third of “unserved” addresses turn out to be zoo exhibits, diligence should be a no-brainer. Instead, NTIA had to press the district to verify its data.

After further discussions, D.C. reduced its list of proposed locations for broadband from 55 to 11. We checked them against the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map. Five were already listed as served. The remaining six were listed as unserved. But no map is perfect, so on a snowy morning last month, I set out with my chief of staff and chief counsel to visit the six ostensibly unserved sites.

It turns out that D.C. wanted to spend $70,000 per location to connect a field house on Catholic University’s campus, a construction trailer a few feet from a pole with visible fiber, a gated Pepco electric utility building, a shed along Amtrak train tracks in Northeast D.C., a nonexistent building along the same Amtrak train tracks, and an open field off the George Washington Parkway.”

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/information-superhighway-to-nowhere-50b8ed50?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqc_PfheqDXepO53h67sW-0FthHohIARxnDyjpd_YIffcRnXpKIEVJDVJR_8ZC4%3D&gaa_ts=69b0daed&gaa_sig=izTNfhEByUX2zCe96grMdgyaultwRSA-3DArCXhZq6LxFPZlLraAz1jz1gQNWoCWaDIs0jk8NpzTCp08wBPu8A%3D%3D

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