After explosive revelations of massive Medicare and Medicaid fraud in Minnesota, it should surprise no one that the rot extends well beyond one state. California, predictably, is no exception. What is shocking is just how deep the corruption runs. According to Dr. Oz, now leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the fraud has even infiltrated California’s hospice system — a program meant to serve the most vulnerable at the end of life.
Hospice care is supposed to be about dignity — prioritizing comfort and quality of life for terminal patients, managing pain and suffering rather than chasing futile treatments. But according to Dr. Oz, that sacred mission is being corrupted:
Dr. Oz just revealed how fraudsters hijacked California’s hospice system.
He exposed how this fraud is ruining lives—and doctors are cashing in on it.
“How is it that we’ve gotten 7x more hospice in California over the last several years?”
“Doctors are being paid to send… pic.twitter.com/eCHBmdGOpK
— Jan Jekielek (@JanJekielek) January 19, 2026
“They realized that they could pay doctors to move people into hospice,” Oz said. “The hospice is designed for the last six months of your life. It means you’re going to die. These hospice programs are created when the most common reason that you’d enter it is cancer. But these days, not everyone with cancer dies, but also you’re putting a lot of people with Alzheimer’s and other conditions in there. So it became a little harder to police.”
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“But what happens if 100 percent of the people in hospice survive six months?” Oz asked. “Like, nobody dies.”
Medicare’s rules are clear: hospice eligibility isn’t supposed to be open-ended. Patients must be reevaluated at 90 days, again at 180 days, and then every six months after that to justify continued enrollment. In reality, the average hospice stay is about 92 days. That’s the system as designed. When patients linger far beyond that window without legitimate medical justification, it raises an obvious red flag — one that suggests oversight is being ignored, rules are being gamed, and taxpayers are footing the bill for abuse that should never be tolerated.
“Doctors are being paid to send people in appropriately into hospice. Now that’s a problem…because if you’re put into hospice, you actually give up the rest of your healthcare protection. You no longer get traditional Medicare benefits because you’re in hospice, you’re dying,” Oz continued, “so we’re not going to pay all these extra expenses for things that aren’t going to benefit you, because you’ve decided to pull back. Voluntarily, you decided that you’re not going to go out there and try to get everything done for you, possible to help you live longer. You’ve made peace with the end.”
“But people are put on hospice who don’t know it, they don’t realize it,” Oz said. “And so now they don’t have access to regular Medicare anymore, so people are dying because they can’t get care because they were falsely tricked into being on hospice.”
“That’s a major concern for me, but then I began to look into how this could possibly happen,” Oz went on. “How is it that we’ve gotten seven times more hospice in California over the last several years? Do we have seven times more people dying? What’s going on here? And we began to realize it’s systemic fraud. Everyone decided not to do anything about this. We’re not going to look at it; it’s too painful, too difficult. Maybe some groups may benefit financially from not checking into this. The doctors are getting engaged so much in hospice that it’s beginning to undermine basic ethos of the healthcare profession.”
Oz said the fraud is “more rampant in California than you can imagine” and estimates billions of tax dollars are lost to fraud.
Dr. Mehmet Oz told me that healthcare fraud is more rampant in California than you can imagine.
He alleged that billions of taxpayer dollars are going to this fraud every year.
Watch our full 40-minute interview below: https://t.co/HMOOuJ8BYS
— Jan Jekielek (@JanJekielek) January 19, 2026
This issue must be addressed, including why doctors place patients in hospice without their knowledge or consent.
