A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday alleged a licensed nurse living in Saugus committed health care fraud in Fresno County from June 2023 to February.
Federal prosecutors in Sacramento alleged that Jesse Zayas, aka Jessa Contreras, defrauded Medicare through two companies she ran, Healing Hands Hospice Inc. and Humane Love Hospice.
Over the two-year period, Zayas, whose home was searched by federal agents last week, is accused of billing the federal government millions of dollars in hospice services never delivered, according to the criminal complaint.
The complaint alleges Zayas purchased the first of two hospice companies in 2023, and maintained work as a nurse for the Los Angeles Unified School District while leading the multimillion-dollar companies. That was described as an alarm bell for investigators in the complaint.
“This case began in September 2023, when a service coordinator at a Salvation Army Retirement Residence in Fresno reported to the FBI that representatives of Humane Love and Healing Hands were going door-to-door signing its residents up for hospice services even though the residents were not terminally ill,” according to the complaint.
“The patients explained that either a nurse or sales representative had knocked on their doors and signed them up for hospice care by asking for their Medicare information,” according to the complaint. “After being enrolled, some of them received prescriptions and other medical equipment such as wheelchairs in the mail. The patients further explained that every few weeks, a nurse would visit them to take their blood pressure. They estimated that the visits lasted five minutes or less.”
To qualify for hospice under Medicare, per the complaint, “a patient must be certified by a physician as being terminally ill, i.e., having a life expectancy of six months or less assuming that the illness runs its normal course.” It also states a patient qualified to receive hospice care under Medicare is entitled to receive it for two 90-day periods, followed by an unlimited number of 60-day periods.
FBI agents reportedly began allegations that Zayas had knowingly and willfully defrauded a health care benefit program, or to obtain, by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, its benefits.
