Steve Hilton Finds a Locked Hollywood ‘Home Health’ Storefront and Blames Becerra for the Fraud Floodgates

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, went looking for a Medicare fraud operation in Hollywood and found a locked door. In a video circulating in mid-October 2026, Hilton and a companion drive to a storefront listed as a home health agency, find no one there, and walk viewers through how such shells allegedly bill the government for patients who may never receive care. Then Hilton names the man he blames for letting it happen: his opponent, Democrat Xavier Becerra, who ran the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden.

It is a campaign video, and its accusations are political. But the problem it points at is not a campaign invention. Federal regulators, a House committee and the current HHS secretary have all described Los Angeles County as ground zero for hospice and home health fraud.

A storefront with no one home

In the video, Hilton introduces a friend named Eric, who says he began checking out home health and hospice agencies after a family member needed services. He describes calling agencies that never answered, websites that did not work, and listings with no reviews, all for entities billing Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program.

The pair pull up one agency’s website on a phone. One image, they note, is just a stock photo, and another “almost looks like it doubles as a Halloween store.” A call to the listed number fails. About ten minutes later they arrive at the address. It is locked, with no unit number to ring. According to records they cite on camera, the agency obtained its federal provider number in 2021 and its Medicare certification in 2023, and three years on it still has no reviews and no public data to speak of. The Rothman Report is not naming the business, because no charge or official finding against it has been reported.

Asked to explain the “anatomy of the scam,” Eric lays it out: set up a home health or hospice agency, often under a name close to an established one, enroll to bill Medicare and Medi-Cal, and buy what he describes as “packets of hundreds of Medicare numbers or Medi-Cal numbers” for “a few hundred thousand dollars.” Then, he says, “over the next several years, you can just bill 1.2 to 1.9 million because that keeps you in a place where you don’t really get flagged.”

Hilton’s charge against Becerra

Hilton does not hedge. “The person who opened the floodgates to all of this fraud was none other than my opponent in the governor’s race,” he says of Becerra. As HHS secretary, Hilton charges, Becerra “massively expanded enrollment,” “dismantled the fraud unit at HHS,” and “changed the policy to something called pay and chase.”

He explains the term: “It used to be the case, if there’s something that seems suspicious or flagged, they would check it out first before sending the money. He changed that around so they’d send the money out and then maybe claw it back later.”

Becerra’s HHS record is not a new target for Hilton. At their September 30, 2026, debate on CNN, the only scheduled head-to-head of the race, Hilton went after Becerra’s tenure as Biden’s HHS secretary from the start, according to the California Globe. Becerra finished first in the June 2 top-two primary, and the two men now face each other in November.

What Kennedy and Congress have said

The sharpest version of the charge comes from Becerra’s successor. At a White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud press conference in Los Angeles in August, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said program integrity at his department had been hollowed out before he arrived. “My predecessor, Xavier Becerra, when he came into my agency, there were only 80 people in program integrity, 80 people,” Kennedy said, according to the California Globe. “This is for 50 states and five territories.” By the time Kennedy took over, he said, “there’s only six people who are in charge of all program integrity for my department!”

Kennedy put that staff against roughly $2.2 trillion in annual payments and some four million transactions a day, and called the staffing gap “an invitation for the fraudsters to come in and steal everything.” He also attacked the pay-and-chase approach, which the California Globe reported he described as paying invoices first, including ones flagged as high-risk, and trying to recover the money later. “This was an insane policy,” he said.

A September 2026 staff report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee repeats Kennedy’s figure, stating that according to the secretary, the Biden administration and Becerra reduced Medicare and Medicaid program integrity staff from 80 to 6 between January 2021 and January 2025. The report attributes the number to Kennedy rather than to its own count. It also defines pay and chase as the traditional model of paying claims first and chasing improper payments afterward, and concludes that prevention-first strategies outperform it.

Becerra’s side of this is missing from the record so far. The California Globe reported in August that his campaign had not issued a detailed response to Kennedy’s staffing and fraud allegations.

Los Angeles really is the epicenter

Whatever voters conclude about who is to blame, the scale of the problem in Southern California is documented. The House committee report notes that Los Angeles County had more than 31 percent of the hospice agencies in the United States in 2022, according to a California State Auditor report, and that 15 new hospices located in a single building flagged as suspicious still received Medicare certification in 2023, despite a statewide freeze on new hospice licenses.

In January 2026, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced a crackdown on home health and hospice fraud in the county. In a May 13, 2026, release, CMS said it had suspended payments to about 800 Los Angeles-area hospices and home health agencies suspected of fraud, which were responsible for $1.4 billion in Medicare spending the prior year, and it imposed six-month nationwide moratoria on new hospice and home health enrollments. “We’ve seen systemic and deeply troubling fraud in the hospice and home health space,” Oz said.

A locked storefront proves nothing on its own, and no one should be convicted by phone camera. But a state where suspect agencies multiply faster than regulators can visit them has a right to ask the candidate who ran HHS for nearly four years what he did about it.

Becerra wants to run California’s budget, and voters deserve a straight answer about what happened to the fraud police while he ran a $2.2 trillion department.

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