8 Arrested in $50M Southern California Health Care Fraud

Federal authorities arrested eight people across Southern California this week on charges connected to a $50 million health care fraud scheme, with many of the defendants accused of using hospice companies as a front to steal from Medicare and private insurers.

The Department of Justice announced the arrests Thursday as part of “Operation Never Say Die,” a crackdown conducted alongside JD Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. In total, 15 people face charges for similar conduct spanning locations from Anaheim to Simi Valley.

The DOJ labeled Southern California a “high-risk environment” for health care fraud. Akil Davis, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, pointed to the scale of the problem in a statement Thursday. “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,” Davis said. “Our aim is to reverse that trend with ‘Operation Never Say Die’ and others like it.”

The case illustrates how hospice care, a service designed for terminally ill patients, has become a vehicle for fraud. Several defendants allegedly billed Medicare for hospice services provided to patients who did not have terminal diagnoses, in some cases recruiting those patients and paying kickbacks to bring them into the schemes.

Among those arrested was Lolita Beronilla Minerd, a licensed vocational nurse based in Artesia. Minerd allegedly filed fraudulent hospice claims to Medicare through her company, Topanga Hospice Care, billing for services rendered to patients without terminal illnesses. Prosecutors say she received more than $8.5 million from Medicare through the scheme.

In Covina, psychologist Gladwin Gill and his wife Amelous Gill face charges tied to their Glendale business, 626 Hospice. The couple allegedly claimed to provide hospice services that were either never delivered or medically unnecessary, and are accused of stealing more than $4 million from Medicare.

A separate Glendale case involves a woman already serving time in federal prison for previous hospice fraud who, along with her husband, allegedly continued operating three Glendale-based hospice facilities. According to the DOJ, she had already been barred from owning health care facilities at the time.

Health care fraud charges at the federal level carry a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison per count.

The operation sweeps across a broad geographic footprint. While no Burbank defendants were named in Thursday’s announcements, the region’s concentration of health care providers and the proximity of several charged businesses to Burbank, including the Glendale operations, signals how closely this kind of fraud can touch the local area. Medicare losses drain resources that affect patients and providers throughout Los Angeles County, not just where the fraud originates.

The arrests build on recent federal enforcement activity in the region. In March, 11 people were arrested in connection with a separate $6 million identity theft-based loan fraud scheme in Los Angeles.

Hospice fraud has drawn increasing federal scrutiny over the past several years, in part because the hospice benefit is difficult to audit in real time. Medicare typically pays a per-diem rate for hospice care without requiring the kind of documentation checkpoints attached to acute hospital stays, creating openings that prosecutors say bad actors have been willing to exploit.

The DOJ did not release figures Thursday on how much of the alleged $50 million has been recovered or is subject to forfeiture proceedings.