One way to judge an elected official is to evaluate his or her reaction when confronted with strong indications of fraud.
Do they say nothing? Do they attack the individuals who uncovered the fraud? Or do they call people on the carpet and order investigations?
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass unintentionally admitted in an interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson that she’s the “say nothing” type. The mayor was attempting to defend her lack of success in ending homeless encampments. “This is a problem that all Angelenos experience and we have got to have a commitment that this has to end,” she said.
A commitment? L.A. residents have been paying higher and higher taxes for a decade specifically to end street homelessness, and we don’t have a commitment?
“The city and the county never made that commitment before,” Bass asserted. And then she said this: “I found something that surprised me. I found a lot of people who work internal in this system who were very resistant to ending street homelessness.”
If you were mayor, spending billions of taxpayer dollars on motels and interim housing and programs to end street homelessness, and you encountered people working in the system who were “very resistant to ending street homelessness,” what would you do?
Would you fire people? End their contracts and funding? Call in the FBI to trace the spending?
Or would you say nothing, all the way up to the moment when Elex Michaelson asks tough questions and you need to deflect blame quickly, because you’re running for re-election?
Tell us the names. Who works “in the system” and is resistant to ending street homelessness? Who pays them?
Obviously, taxpayers pay them. We also pay for the firefighters, police and paramedics who respond to calls around the clock, every day, often on overtime, for fires, overdoses and violent attacks in and around tent encampments. We pay sanitation crews and hazmat experts for repeated cleanups. We pay for public health testing of rats spreading fleaborne typhus and leptospirosis.
When Mayor Karen Bass found “a lot of people” working in the system who were “very resistant to ending street homelessness,” did she call them out for making a career out of monetizing broken bodies on the streets? No, she went with the “say nothing” reaction.
Examples of the “attack the investigator” reaction to likely fraud can be found in the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom. In March, independent journalist Nick Shirley released a video calling out a large number of questionable hospice providers clustered in Los Angeles, following his high-profile video investigation into fraudulent daycare providers in Minnesota. In response, Newsom’s online press team posted a ghoulish AI image of Shirley that portrayed him as a child predator.
And when Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, came to the L.A. area to highlight a concentration of fraudulent hospice and adult-care providers that he said were run by the Russian Armenian mafia, Newsom filed a civil rights complaint accusing Dr. Oz of racism.
In fact, Oz is providing an example of the “call people on the carpet and order investigations” reaction to apparent fraud. In a May 13 White House news conference with Vice President JD Vance, Oz and other officials discussed anti-fraud initiatives and how different states were, or were not, cooperating with them.
“California has not taken fraud very seriously,” Oz said. He said the state’s “submissions of Medicare records and the backup estimates are generating major red flags,” including $630 million in suspicious billings “from the folks who are egregiously the top 5% of outliers in billing.” These were “numbers so big, you can’t imagine anyone billing for these numbers of patients and that much for each patient,” he said, “and so, we’re asking California to clarify for us how it got there.”
Something else the anti-fraud task force found: California’s spending growth for in-home services is “twice the rate of the average of the rest of the country.”
The task force also stopped $200 million in “questionable expenditures,” much of it “linked to immigration-related costs, folks who are undocumented.”
“We’d like the state to at least come to the table and explain to us how these outlier payments have been generated,” Oz said. But it won’t. So the federal government froze $1.34 billion that California would have received for its Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, an action Oz said was taken “because we want California to get serious about this fraud.”
Instead of getting serious, California is trying to raise taxes to keep the scam going. Assemblyman Isaac Bryan cited the $1.34 billion funding freeze on the Assembly floor as a reason to pass Assembly Bill 1768, which will allow tax increases in Los Angeles and Contra Costa Counties to exceed the state cap on local sales taxes. Bryan made it sound as if patients would be hurt by the freeze, but in fact, the frozen funds are exclusively for fraud investigations that the state won’t do.
Why not?
The anti-fraud task force has a theory. “We are concerned that some governors see these programs as jobs programs,” Oz said, in a way that “resembles political patronage.”
That could explain the lack of follow-up after the California state auditor warned in 2022 of exactly the hospice fraud found in 2026. Oz said the California Department of Health finally adopted a rule in December to mandate, starting January 1, that an individual provider cannot have more than one hospice. “This is a red flag issue,” he said. “Why would a doctor need to have 20 hospices?”
Guess what happened to that rule. “For reasons we don’t understand, and I’d love to pose that right here to the state of California, someone very senior in their government pulled down that rule, never let it issue, and we never got help from them,” Oz said. “That’s why we went out the first week of January to say, ‘What’s going on here?’”
It’s a rhetorical question. He knows. We all do.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley