The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested eight people in Southern California on Thursday morning, finding more than $50 million in healthcare fraud.
The eight defendants include three nurses, a chiropractor, and a psychologist, who were arrested on federal charges that they defrauded the nation’s healthcare system out of more than $50 million.
“In coordination with the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, federal law enforcement executed several arrests and search warrants in the Los Angeles area this morning targeting hospice and health care fraud,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli wrote on X. “Operation Never Say Die involves 11 defendants who engaged in fraud totaling more than $50 million.”
The defendants were accused of running sham hospice care facilities that defrauded Medicare by using people without terminal illnesses as beneficiaries, according to the California Justice Department.
Six of the eight defendants will appear in federal court on Thursday afternoon.
“The Southern California region is a high-risk environment for hospice-related and many other forms of health care fraud,” said Akil Davis, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “The United States loses hundreds of billions of dollars annually to healthcare fraud at the expense of all American taxpayers, whose benefits decrease as premiums, co-payments and taxes grow. Our aim is to reverse that trend with ‘Operation Never Say Die’ and others like it.”
Two defendants, married couple Amelou Gill and Gladwin Gill, co-own 626 Hospice, which operates at St. Francis Palliative Care in Anaheim, California.
“The Gills allegedly schemed to defraud Medicare by paying illegal kickbacks for the referral of patients who were not dying,” the California DOJ said, adding that the Gills “submitted more than $5.2 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare for hospice services that either were not medically necessary or were not provided.”
The raid took place in the residential neighborhood of San Dimas, California. FBI SWAT agents crowded outside the scene and announced over a speaker that they had an arrest warrant, according to CBS News. Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was also at the scene.
Vice President JD Vance, head of Trump administration’s anti-fraud task force, congratulated Oz and Essayli for the arrests in a statement on X.
“Our task force isn’t wasting any time cracking down on fraud,” he wrote.
Thursday’s raid comes amid Republicans’ broader crackdown on healthcare fraud in the Golden State.
In early March, Kimberly Brandt, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ chief operating officer, testified before the House oversight committee on hospice fraud in California.
According to Brandt’s testimony, federal investigators have stripped billing privileges from three-fifths of newly enrolled hospice agencies in California. Additionally, of the remaining programs, 35% were flagged for corrective action.
The House oversight committee followed up with a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) requesting state documents related to federally funded hospice programs.
“The Committee is concerned your administration does not have sufficient internal controls to prevent and detect fraud and is not conducting proper oversight of these hospice programs,” they wrote to Newsom on March 23.
The California crackdown is part of the Trump administration’s broader “War on Fraud” effort, which Vance was tapped to lead earlier this year.