Gavin Newsom's California certified a burrito stand as a legitimate hospice care facility.
Now Congress wants to know how that passed state licensing, certification, and accreditation.
What they found out is far worse than the burrito stand.
Newsom's California Approved Fake Hospices While $600 Million in Medicare Fraud Ran Unchecked
Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, walked Congress through what federal investigators actually found when they started knocking on doors in Los Angeles.
Empty offices. Five months of unopened mail piled against the door. No staff. No patients.
Every one of them had cleared California's entire regulatory process.
"How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand in California?" Clark asked the House Ways and Means Committee. "How do you put a hospice in a tire store in California? That all had to be vetted through licensure and certification and accreditation."
JD Vance's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud suspended 447 hospices in the Los Angeles area alone – representing more than $600 million in suspected fraud.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz halted payments to 450 of those operations and then waited for the complaints to roll in.
Not one came.
"We have stopped payments to 450 hospices in California," Oz announced. "Guess what? Not one has called us asking to reinstitute them. No one's complaining because they know they got caught."
RFK Jr. explained the recruitment playbook to the Ways and Means Committee: fraudsters handed $600 flat-screen televisions to people in poor neighborhoods, signed them up for hospice care, then billed Medicare $6,000 per head. Almost none of the fake patients ever died – because almost none of them were actually there.
California's regulators saw none of it.
Fraudsters Enrolled Seniors in Fake California Hospices and Medicare Denied Them Real Treatment
While fraudsters cashed Medicare checks from burrito counters, actual Americans were being trapped in a system they never signed up for.
Dr. Lynn Ianni is a licensed psychotherapist with nearly 40 years of clinical experience.
Someone enrolled her in hospice without her knowledge.
Medicare then classified her as end-of-life and denied her legitimate medical care for months.
"Imagine being told, in effect, that you are at the end of your life when you are not, and then being denied access to care because of that error," Ianni testified. "It was not just frustrating. It was terrifying."
That's the real cost Newsom won't talk about – elderly Americans cut off from doctors and treatments because a criminal filed paperwork in their name.
Clark told Congress there's no clean mechanism to exit the system once someone is fraudulently enrolled.
"We need better enforcement on entry," she said. "We're not going to convict our way out of this. We have to stop them from entering the system."
How Hospice Centers Exploded 1500 Percent While Newsom Looked Away
This isn't a regulatory failure. This is the predictable result of a state that prioritized expanding Medicaid over building any gatekeeping to protect it.
Hospice centers in California exploded by 1,500 percent in recent years while Newsom's office looked the other way.
One building in Los Angeles County had 89 hospices registered to it.
California Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo found 197 hospices registered to a single medical plaza in Van Nuys.
When investigative journalist Nick Shirley broke the story open in March, California Democrats responded by trying to pass legislation to criminalize exactly that kind of reporting – what critics called the Stop Nick Shirley Act.
Newsom's press office pushed back on the scandal, claiming the state has no role in Medicare billing. "We are glad the Trump Admin is taking action to combat fraud," his team posted on X.
He's glad now. He wasn't building guardrails when his regulators were waving through burrito stands.
Oz put the total national fraud in social services at roughly $100 billion annually – and California is ground zero.
The question Congress is now asking is the right one: how does a burrito stand pass hospice licensure in the first place?
Newsom hasn't answered it.
Don't hold your breath.
Sources:
- Louis Casiano, "Hospice CEO asks Congress how a provider can operate out of a burrito stand in California with no oversight," Fox News, April 22, 2026.
- "450 Hospice Providers Shut Down in California, Not One Called to Say Anything: Dr. Oz," Lifezette, April 20, 2026.
- Leslie Eastman, "A Burrito Stand Qualifies for Hospice Funding Under California's Medicaid System," Legal Insurrection, April 23, 2026.
- Joe Kovacs, "How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand?" WorldNetDaily, April 22, 2026.
- "Seven Key Moments: Hearing with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.," Ways and Means Committee, April 21, 2026.
