April 20, 2026

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday that hospice fraud in the Los Angeles area has cost the federal government an estimated $5 billion, a figure he delivered while describing a scheme built on fake addresses, recruited patients, and phantom care that nobody in the previous administration bothered to stop.

Kennedy’s testimony laid out a fraud operation that is staggering in its simplicity. Operators set up hospice companies at invented addresses. They went into low-income neighborhoods and paid residents flat-screen televisions and $600 cash to hand over their personal identification. Those residents were then enrolled as hospice patients, on paper. The federal government paid $6,000 per enrollee. And almost none of the “patients” ever died, because they were never actually receiving end-of-life care.

A single address, over 100 licenses

Van Duyne opened the exchange by asking Kennedy whether a specific address meant anything to him: 14545 Friar Street in Van Nuys, California. It didn’t. She told him why it should.

“We had over 100 different licenses for hospices, yep, right at this address, and we asked him what he was doing about it, basically nothing.”

The “him” was former HHS Secretary Becerra, whom Van Duyne said she had pressed on the same waste, fraud, and abuse during the prior administration. Her account of that exchange was blunt: she got nothing.

Van Duyne then asked Kennedy to walk through what his office was actually doing. His answer was direct. Kennedy said the department had already shut down 500 hospices in Los Angeles. He added a detail that speaks for itself: not a single member of Congress or anyone else had called to complain about the closures.

“We’ve already shut down 500 hospices and Los Angeles, and incidentally, we haven’t had one call from Congress or anybody else about complaining because clearly these were fraudulent. A lot of these places, like you say, they’d have, they were just invented addresses.”

No complaints. No constituents calling their representatives to say a real hospice they relied on had been wrongly shuttered. That silence tells you everything about how real these operations were.

Christopher Sign was found dead in his Alabama home on the morning of June 12, 2021, hanged from his home office door, his wife and eldest son the ones who discovered him. The Jefferson County Coroner’s office ruled it a suicide almost immediately. But nearly five years later, the people who knew Sign best say nothing about that morning adds up, and they want answers that local authorities have refused to provide.

Sign was the Birmingham television anchor who, in 2016, broke one of the most consequential stories of the presidential campaign: Bill Clinton’s private meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac in Phoenix while the Justice Department was investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as Secretary of State. The meeting prompted a public reckoning within the Justice Department. Lynch pledged to accept the recommendations of career prosecutors and the FBI. Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted.

Sign paid a price for that reporting. He told Fox News in 2020 that his family received significant death threats after he broke the story. He wrote in his book, Secret on the Tarmac, that he had made his position clear to those around him.

“I made it clear (to others) in front of my wife that I was not suicidal. We all laughed but deep down knew it was serious.”

Now, as the Daily Mail reports in an extensive investigation, Sign’s relatives and close friends are speaking publicly for the first time about what they describe as a series of troubling circumstances surrounding his death, and a wall of silence from the officials who handled the case.

Sign was 45 years old, a former University of Alabama offensive lineman listed at 6-foot-1, 215 pounds. He had three young sons. Friends described a man at the top of his career with a full calendar ahead of him.

Josh Swords, a former Alabama teammate and Tuscaloosa defense attorney, told the Daily Mail that Sign had plans for the very next day, a baseball game with friends and his son. Father’s Day was coming. All three boys had birthdays approaching. Full-pad football was about to start. A family vacation was scheduled.

Swords did not mince words about the official conclusion:

“This was a 45-year-old guy at the top of his game with a beautiful stay-at-home wife and three rising superstar sons. He loves his job, he came home on a Friday night after a great week at work, and decides to kill himself at home where his boys are? No way, no how.”

What happened in the hours after Sign’s death raised further alarm among his family. His body was cremated less than 48 hours later, before his parents, who drove in from Texas, could view him. Sign’s mother, Susan Sign, 80, told the Daily Mail she arrived to find a house full of strangers and a daughter-in-law who barely acknowledged her.

“I expected her to take me aside to talk to me. Then I told her mother I would like to see his body and have his brother select his clothes, and the mother told me, ‘oh he’s already been cremated.’ That was a difficult moment for me, not to have the opportunity to take one last look at my son.”

The speed of the cremation is one of the central grievances. Bill Naugher, the Birmingham-based publisher of Sign’s book, questioned why no one paused to honor what Sign himself had written.

“I don’t know why we didn’t pump the brakes a little bit and say, ‘Listen, it’s in the book that he’s not going to commit suicide, so let’s at least honor his request and take a couple of days to do a full autopsy.’ But once the death was ruled a suicide that shut it down.”

Whether a full autopsy was ever performed remains unclear. The Daily Mail reported that relatives raised concerns about its absence, but no documentary confirmation appeared in the reporting.