Reform California with Carl DeMaio · Carl DeMaio

Fraud Indictments in CA Don't Go Far Enough!

April 11, 2026·19 min·1 clip

How six people stole $270 million from California's Medi-Cal program without ever meeting patients.

Carl DeMaio opens by framing recent California fraud indictments as real but insufficient, and contrasts federal prosecution efforts (which he calls legitimate) against state-level efforts (which he calls a dog and pony show). He briefly promotes his Reform California organization and its Doge California program before moving to the details. The main federal case involves Southern California U.S. Attorney Bill Assele bringing charges against a small group of defendants who pleaded guilty to stealing approximately $270 million from California's Medi-Cal program. The fraud involved billing at maximum reimbursable rates without prior authorization, paying kickbacks for patient referrals, and prescribing 19 high-reimbursement drugs to patients they never met or examined. DeMaio notes that Assele has previously brought similar federal cases involving homelessness fund fraud and hospice fraud. DeMaio then describes a Twitter spat on April 8th in which Assele directly criticized California Attorney General Rob Bonta for doing nothing to prevent fraud while the federal government cleaned up after the state. Assele is quoted saying that prosecuting fraudsters 'to whom California blindly handed out millions of dollars does not count as fighting fraud.' DeMaio argues Assele also told Bonta to stop filing political lawsuits against the Trump administration and start prosecuting state fraudsters. The day after this exchange, on April 9th, Bonta filed his own indictments against 21 people for $267 million in hospice fraud, which DeMaio dismisses as reactive and insufficient. DeMaio notes that the two cases combined involve fewer than 30 people and half a billion dollars, and argues there are many more fraudsters operating. He criticizes Newsom for responding to earlier whistleblowing by Dr. Oz — who raised concerns about fake hospices in January — by calling the accusations racist and filing a civil rights complaint rather than investigating the fraud. DeMaio then pivots to the IHSS program, which he calls the fastest growing California welfare program and the state's largest employer with 800,000 workers. He plays a social media influencer video in which a woman explains how she earned over $6,000 in a single month from IHSS for caring for her own child at home, using a time sheet with 18-hour daily claims. DeMaio says conservative estimates put IHSS fraud at $6-12 billion per year out of the program's $30 billion annual cost. He argues California deliberately structured IHSS as employment rather than welfare so that union dues could be extracted from all paychecks, including fraudulent ones, with those dues flowing into political campaign funds. He calls this money laundering and argues it explains why politicians have no incentive to fix the program. DeMaio concludes by calling for criminal prosecutions of politicians and a tooth-to-tail audit of every program.

As heard by us

A sharp take on California fraud cases and the politics around them.

California's fraud indictments are the hook, but the piece keeps returning to DeMaio's larger complaint: the state has let taxpayer-money fraud sit too long.

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Why you'd press play

You want the fraud-fight version of California politics, delivered at full volume.

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