Following shocking revelations of widespread theft of taxpayer dollars in Minnesota, Trump officials and independent journalists are now uncovering evidence pointing to a sprawling Medicare hospice fraud scheme in California, prompting yet another federal investigation. Just as the Minnesota Somali daycare scandal was a political death sentence for Governor Tim Walz, California’s fraud could prove disastrous for Governor Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions.
YouTuber and online influencer Nick Shirley is again at the center of the bombshell findings in California. At the end of 2025, Shirley gained nationwide fame after he went door to door visiting taxpayer-subsidized daycare providers in Minneapolis, asking for proof that the businesses were legitimate. At the daycares where someone even answered the door, most refused to confirm that there were any children there.
Shirley was not the first person to call out this potentially massive scandal, but his video investigation finally forced it into the national spotlight. For the first time, Democrat leaders in Minnesota faced tough questions on the scope of welfare fraud in their state.
Shirley’s latest investigation took him to California to look into hospice fraud, which the state’s Democrat attorney general has called an “epidemic.” Shirley specifically focused on a questionable strip mall in the Van Nuys neighborhood in Los Angeles, ground zero for the reported 1,500 percent explosion in new hospice agencies in the state. According to the California Globe, there are “500 hospice agencies crammed into a three-mile radius in Van Nuys.”
In a highly entertaining video, Shirley shows how hospice operators are raking in massive sums of taxpayer dollars without actually providing any services. In one instance, a motel had been converted into mini hospice offices, where Shirley confronts the alleged fraudsters. While some offices had a few workers in them – who did not want to answer basic questions – others were completely empty rooms.
As a local news outlet summarized, “Time and again, registered addresses turned out to be vacant shells: buildings with dead phone lines, piles of unopened mail, parking lots filled with luxury vehicles, and zero evidence of patients or caregiving, even as millions of taxpayer dollars continued to flow from public programs.”
As Shirley explains, fraudsters use the Medicare beneficiary numbers of seniors who are actually healthy to steal taxpayer funds. California hospice enrollment has inexplicably risen by more than 1,000 percent in recent years, leading to $170 million in suspect billings.
Critics – including Newsom – argue that Shirley is using sensationalist tactics or inflating the scale of the fraud. Just because a large number of supposed hospice providers rent low-cost space in the same area, they claim, that does not necessarily mean that they are all engaged in fraud.
But as Shirley’s Minnesota investigation proved, even if only a fraction of the explosion in hospice providers are fake, that still amounts to an astonishing amount of fraud and a major scandal. Moreover, his anecdotal reporting isn’t the only evidence that something is amiss in the California hospice space.
Just weeks ago, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, led by Dr. Mehmet Oz, sent its own team in to investigate the proliferation of hospice claims in California. “Eighteen percent of the whole country’s home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles County,” Dr. Oz said recently, according to Fox News. “How is that possible?”
Further highlighting this extremely suspect spending is the incredible survival rate of LA County patients. The reality is that, while some hospice patients recover, the vast majority ultimately pass away shortly after entering hospice care. But Fox reported that, in “many [LA County] hospices, patients never die, with court records showing hospices billing the federal government for 18 months and more.”
But instead of working to root out the fraudsters who are stealing taxpayer dollars, Governor Newsom and California Democrats appear more interested in attacking the investigators. Newsom quickly accused Oz of racism for pointing out that a sizable chunk of the suspected fraud comes from “the Russian Armenian mafia.” (Oz, notably, is of Turkish descent. Turkey and Armenia have been at odds since the early 1900s, when Turkey killed 1.5 million Armenians in an act of genocide.)
Newsom also filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and said Oz “spewed baseless and racially charged allegations.” His press office then mocked Nick Shirley for going to daycares in California and asking questions about potential fraud as well.
But the great irony is that Newsom himself has claimed to care about stopping fraud. In January, Newsom boasted about removing 280 licenses from hospice operators in the past two years. CBS News later reported that “over 700 of the roughly 1,800 hospices in LA County trigger multiple red flags for fraud as defined by the state” and found that more than 40 percent of companies “still operate despite having multiple signs the state has outlined as indicators of fraud.”
All of this suggests that Newsom only wants to give the appearance of combating fraud without actually doing anything to stop it – hence why he’s so upset when journalists like Shirley and the federal government expose his failures and deception.
In March, Republican Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo also challenged Newsom’s assertions that he is cleaning up the system. Like Shirley, she traveled to the controversial Van Nuys cluster and identified signs of potential fraud, such as a “dilapidated building” without a “wheelchair ramp” or “accessible parking.”
While Macedo challenged Newsom to do more, accountability is ultimately up to voters – and not just voters in California. As Newsom eyes the White House, taxpayers nationwide should ask themselves whether a governor who can’t (or won’t) police billions in federal fraud in his own state is deserving of higher office.
Matt Lamb is an AMAC Newsline contributor and associate editor for The College Fix. He previously worked for Students for Life of America, Students for Life Action, and Turning Point USA. He previously interned for Open the Books. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, The Federalist, LifeSiteNews, Human Life Review, Headline USA, and other outlets. The opinions expressed are his own. Follow him @mattlamb22 on X.
