How Do You Afford a $28 Million Mansion on Medi-Cal Billings? Nobody Has an Answer — Least of All Curtis Kurkova.
- $40,500,000 total Medi-Cal billings by Curtis Kurkova's company, HeroCare LLC, from 2020 through 2024, per City Journal's review of state payment data — City Journal
- $28,000,000 price of the Hidden Hills, California mansion Kurkova and his husband bought next door to the Kardashians, financed with a roughly $19 million bank loan signed in January 2026 — City Journal deed review
- 5,000x growth in HeroCare's annual Medi-Cal billing between 2020 ($7,800) and 2024 ($18,860,000) — 85 percent of it in the final two years alone — City Journal
- Zero charges filed against Kurkova, HeroCare, or any related entity by the DOJ, HHS-OIG, or the California Attorney General as of publication — this is investigative journalism, not a confirmed government probe — Civic Intelligence review of public records
Curtis Kurkova is a licensed respiratory therapist who runs a small Medi-Cal-billing durable medical equipment company registered in Chino, California. In 2020, that company, HeroCare LLC, billed the state’s Medicaid program $7,800. By 2024, HeroCare billed $18,860,000 — in a single year. Over five years, its total Medi-Cal billings reached $40,500,000. In that same stretch, Kurkova legally changed his name from Curtis Ray Hotchkiss Jr., and he and his husband, Christian Kurkova, bought a $28,000,000 mansion in Hidden Hills, California, on the same street as the Kardashians’ compound.
No one has been charged. No federal or state agency — not the Department of Justice, not the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, not the California Department of Health Care Services, not Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) — has publicly confirmed opening an investigation into Kurkova or HeroCare specifically. What exists, as of this writing, is a City Journal investigation, published September 2, 2026 by Christopher F. Rufo and Madeleine Rowley and amplified by RedState, that surfaced the billing numbers, visited the addresses HeroCare listed on its own paperwork, and asked Kurkova to explain the gap between his billing curve and his front door. He has not answered.
The year-by-year numbers, drawn from City Journal’s review of Medi-Cal payment records, show a company that went from negligible to one of the state’s more aggressive billers inside five years: $7,800 in 2020, $396,500 in 2021, $5,680,000 in 2022, $15,560,000 in 2023 — the same year Kurkova filed his name change — and $18,860,000 in 2024. The 2023-2024 total alone, $34,400,000, accounts for roughly 85 percent of everything HeroCare billed the program across the full five-year span.
There is a mismatch investigators flagged as a red flag on its own: HeroCare’s stated specialty is pediatric respiratory equipment, yet roughly 30 percent of its five-year Medi-Cal revenue reportedly came from billing codes for urinary catheters — a product line with no obvious connection to pediatric respiratory care, and one fraud examiners nationally have flagged for years as a common vehicle for durable-medical-equipment billing abuse. Beyond the mansion, City Journal’s reporting traced other real estate in Kurkova’s and his husband’s names: a $1,100,000 home in Riverside County bought in 2020, a $4,700,000 home in Sherman Oaks, a $1,450,000 home in Big Bear City, and a $9,800,000 home in Encino — alongside sports cars, private jets, and luxury resort travel documented through Christian Kurkova’s own social media posts.
When City Journal reporters visited the Chino address HeroCare LLC lists on its state business filing, they found a different medical company occupying the unit. “Hero Health Care? I’m not sure… This is Pristine Home Health,” the woman who answered the door told them. A second address tied to the operation, in Van Nuys, had nothing on-site but a paper sign reading “HeroCare” taped to a window.
The company’s public footprint is thinner than its Medi-Cal number would suggest. HeroCare’s own website carries an empty “Shop” page, and its Facebook presence has fewer than 30 followers — for an operation that reportedly billed the state $18,860,000 in a single year. Between July 2024 and June 2025, the same window covering the bulk of its billing, the operation cycled through a string of related entity names: HeroCare, HeroCare East LLC, Hero Healthcare Group, and HeroCare 2 LLC, the last of which later filed a certificate of cancellation with the state declaring it “has not conducted any business.” Kurkova’s brother, Michael Amar — formerly Michael Hotchkiss, also a licensed respiratory therapist — formed Hero Healthcare Group in 2025. When reporters returned to the Hidden Hills mansion seeking answers about the discrepancies, the gates were shut.
Fraud analysts who reviewed HeroCare’s numbers for City Journal did not mince words about the pattern, even while stopping short of alleging a specific crime absent charges.
“Huge year over year billing increases, with claims for multiple types of urinary catheters, from a specialty respiratory shop…raises questions that must be resolved.”
Sam Adolphsen, former Maine DHHS Chief Operating Officer
“This is the kind of statistical anomaly that demands serious investigation.”
Haywood Talcove, CEO, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Government
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) — Has run California’s executive branch since 2019, spanning HeroCare’s entire billing history, from $7,800 in 2020 to $18,860,000 in 2024. His administration’s Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) administers Medi-Cal and is responsible for provider enrollment and claims-integrity review.
California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS)— The state agency that pays Medi-Cal claims and is charged with catching billing anomalies before they reach eight figures. Whether DHCS’s own claims-review systems ever flagged HeroCare’s trajectory is, as of publication, unanswered; DHCS has not issued a public statement addressing HeroCare specifically.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA)— Oversees the state’s Medicaid fraud enforcement unit. No public statement addressing this specific company has been located.
The accountability question sitting underneath the anomaly is straightforward: how does a single provider’s annual Medi-Cal billing rise roughly 5,000-fold in five years — from $7,800 to $18,860,000 — without triggering a public review by the state agency built to catch exactly that kind of curve?
The HeroCare story lands inside a broader federal push against California’s Medicaid program. CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz has separately argued that fraud has become “a feature” of blue-state Medicaid systems, and in April 2026 President Trump named Vice President JD Vance the administration’s Medicaid “Fraud Czar,” explicitly citing California among the target states.
Vice President JD Vance is now in charge of 'FRAUD' in the United States. It is massive and pervasive... We will call him the 'FRAUD CZAR,' and his focus will be primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota... have had a 'free for all' in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.
Trump names Vance 'Fraud Czar,' naming California explicitly among target states — April 3, 2026
City Journal’s own reporting on HeroCare tagged Bill Essayli, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, directly — the office with jurisdiction over Medi-Cal-provider fraud cases in the region where HeroCare is registered. Essayli has separately called Newsom the “king of fraud” amid the Trump administration’s wider California corruption probe. Newsom’s press office has dismissed that broader federal push as political theater rather than a genuine accountability effort.
Curtis Kurkova has billed California Medicaid $40 million, and there is no evidence that his company even exists. Curtis and his husband have flaunted their wealth all over social media. Taxpayers deserve answers as to where their $40 million went.
EXCLUSIVE: A respiratory therapist named Curtis Kurkova billed California Medicaid $40 million, then spent millions on sports cars, private jets, luxury resorts, and an enormous mansion next to the Kardashian house. The experts told us it had all the red flags for fraud...
Newsom’s office has pushed back hard on the administration’s framing of the broader fraud campaign, calling it a “recycled political stunt” rather than a good-faith investigation.
Today's announcement from Dr. Oz is the same recycled political stunt we've seen before. California isn't being targeted because Trump has evidence of fraud. We are being targeted for political reasons — and because Dr. Oz doesn't understand that we are SAVING taxpayers money.
For scale on what a confirmed Medi-Cal fraud prosecution looks like — a wholly separate case, cited here only as pattern context and not as evidence against Kurkova — California pharmacy operator Paul Randall pleaded guilty in a federal case to orchestrating a $270,000,000 Medi-Cal drug-reimbursement fraud scheme, the kind of scale and structure prosecutors have successfully charged before in the same program.
Curtis Kurkova, his husband, and his brother did not respond to City Journal’s questions on the record. A lawyer identifying himself only as “Mike” did call the outlet — not to address the billing figures, the entity churn, or the vacant business addresses, but to object to what he characterized as “homophobic” framing in the reporting. He did not dispute the numbers.
That silence is the story’s current end point. No charge has been filed. No agency has confirmed a probe. What is on the public record is a licensing file, a set of state payment figures, a shuttered storefront, a rotating cast of entity names, and a $28 million gate that closed when reporters came asking. Whether that adds up to fraud is a question for prosecutors and auditors — not for this article, and not yet for anyone else.
A California respiratory therapist’s company went from $7,800 to $18,860,000 in annual Medi-Cal billings in five years, and its principal now owns a $28,000,000 mansion. That pattern is what fraud analysts call a red flag worth investigating — not proof of a crime. No charges have been filed against Curtis Kurkova or HeroCare LLC. No agency has confirmed opening a case. What is confirmed is that a registered business address turned out to house a different company, that the entity has changed names four times in a year, and that no one connected to it will answer the billing question on the record. Under Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), whose Department of Health Care Services administers the program HeroCare billed, that question remains open.
