RFK Jr.'s hospice comments referred to fraud, not patients' life expectancy burdening taxpayers

Claim: U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said people in hospice care weren't dying fast enough and were costing taxpayers too much money. Rating: ContextKennedy did not explicitly that hospice patients cost taxpayers too much money because they received treatment for too long. Instead, he was specifically referring to instances of suspected hospice fraud in California. In late August 2026, a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said people in hospice care weren't dying fast enough and were costing taxpayers too much money. For example, independent journalist Aaron Rupar shared a clip of Kennedy speaking on X and wrote, "RFK Jr complains that people in hospice aren't dying quick enough and therefore cost too much money." Similar claims about Kennedy's alleged comments on people receiving hospice care also circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and Reddit (archived). Snopes readers contacted us about the claim. Though Kennedy did speak about hospice care during an appearance on the Fox News program "Saturday in America" on Aug. 29, summaries such as Rupar's on X did not accurately reflect his words. Kennedy did not explicitly say that hospice patients cost taxpayers money because they received treatment for too long. Rather, he said hospices in California had fraudulently received federal funds, pointing to billing for patients over multiple years instead of the typical several months as one example. In August 2026, The Associated Press reported on one incident of fraud where a California hospice billed Medicare for a healthy 71-year-old woman. In a recording of the "Saturday in America" town hall featuring Kennedy, he said (at 52:52): We closed down thousands of hospices in California, they didn't have patients, they were just billing us. And the way we found them is because the patients would never die. And so, we could see, we've been paying for this guy for five years — usually, if you go to a hospice, it means you've got three months left to live — these people were never dying, they just had the patient numbers and we were being charged $6,000 a month and just paying, I think 8,000 of them, of these hospices. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars stolen every year. Given the above, we find claims that Kennedy said hospice patients weren't dying fast enough and costing taxpayers money false. Instead, he was specifically referring to instances of suspected hospice fraud. We contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask when it closed the 8,000 hospices Kennedy mentioned and how much money the department estimated hospice fraudsters had received and await a reply. Medicare, the U.S. federal health insurance program for people 65 and older, covers hospice care for eligible patients. According to Medicare's website, a patient is eligible if one or more doctors certify they are terminally ill, with a life expectancy of six months or less — not three, as Kennedy said. The insurance program covers hospice care for two initial 90-day periods and successive unlimited 60-day periods. Vice President JD Vance's anti-fraud task force, which President Donald Trump established in March 2026, has focused on hospice fraud through Medicare. The Associated Press reported in August 2026 that fraudsters opened fake hospices and tricked real patients into enrolling, or stole people's identities to bill Medicare for hospice services they did not receive. In May 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced six-month moratoriums on Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies. The centers said they had worked with Vance's anti-fraud task force to suspend federal payments to 800 hospices and home health agencies suspected of fraud in Los Angeles. The suspected fraudulent companies received $1.4 billion in Medicare payments in 2025, according to the news release. The release noted that hospice fraud was especially prevalent in Arizona, California, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada and Texas. California's Department of Justice described hospice fraud as "an epidemic" in the state. The department said it carried out its own investigations into hospice fraud within Medi-Cal, California's state-level health insurance program and that it had secured 51 "hospice related convictions" since 2021. For further reading, Snopes routinely investigates claims about Medicare.