A House Energy and Commerce Committee report has detailed sprawling fraud across Medicare and Medicaid programs, including a Colorado case in which a transportation provider allegedly billed the state for rides given to a patient who had already died.
Wesam Yassin, one of two non-emergency medical transportation providers charged by state and local prosecutors in Colorado in February 2026, is accused of billing Colorado Medicaid a total of $3.3 million through a company called Sama Limo. According to the report, Yassin charged $283,000 for 64 rides for a single person — more than $4,000 per ride — and roughly $165,000 of those charges were submitted after the patient had died.
A federal release announcing the charges said proceeds from the scheme were allegedly used for “the purchase of a home, furnishings, luxury vehicles, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery.”
The report also cited charges against Ashley Marie Stevens, accused of attempting to bilk the state out of more than $1 million, including roughly $400,000 billed for non-medical rides for herself and her family and for “ghost rides” that never took place.
Hospice concentration in Los Angeles County
The report flagged what it described as suspicious clustering of hospice providers in Los Angeles County, California. “Investigators observed nearly 500 hospices operating in a three-mile radius in L.A. County, 137 hospices operating on Van Nuys Boulevard alone, and 89 companies registered to a single address in Van Nuys,” the report said.
House lawmakers had earlier raised concerns with the Department of Health and Human Services that a surge in home health and hospice providers pointed to possible fraud tied to foreign criminal groups. The report cited a March 2022 California State Auditor’s report and HHS hospice ownership data showing L.A. County accounted for more than 31% of all hospice agencies in the United States in 2022.
California’s Department of Public Health froze new hospice licenses in January 2022, but the report found that 15 new hospices located in a single Los Angeles County building still received Medicare certification in 2023.
International schemes and a Minnesota autism program
The report also described a scheme in which members of Russian organized crime groups purchased 30 small medical supply companies already receiving federal dollars and billed Medicare nearly $11 billion for urinary catheters as part of a years-long operation that targeted as much as $3 billion in taxpayer funds. More than 99% of the billed amount never went out the door. Similar equipment fraud schemes implicated actors in Estonia, Pakistan, Georgia and Hong Kong.
In Minnesota, the report cited the case of Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, who pleaded guilty to attempting to defraud $6 million from a state Medicaid-funded autism therapy program. He and co-defendants are accused of hiring unqualified people as behavior counselors and enrolling children by bribing their parents. Yussuf admitted at his plea hearing that he did not know anyone with autism, according to the report.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie said combating fraud is “a coast-to-coast battle.”
“Every instance of fraud we uncover represents money stolen from taxpayers and care taken away from the patients who depend on it most,” Guthrie said.
The committee’s report framed healthcare fraud as a recurring drain on programs meant to serve the elderly, disabled, children and pregnant women, warning that fraudulent claims have contributed to identity theft, long waiting lists and substandard care for patients.
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