Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday filed a civil rights complaint against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, after Oz posted a video accusing Armenian crime groups of carrying out widespread healthcare fraud in Los Angeles.
The video shows Oz being driven around a section of Van Nuys where he says that about $3.5 billion worth of medicare fraud has been perpetrated by hospice and home care businesses, claiming that “it’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.”
At one point in the video, which was posted Tuesday on the agency’s official social media accounts, Oz stands in front of Cyrillic signs for a bakery and says, “you notice that the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect and it also highlights the fact that this is an organized crime mafia deal.”
In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom called on the agency to investigate “Dr. Oz’s baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California.”
“Such racially charged and false public statements by anyone involved in administering these critical federal healthcare programs seriously risks chilling participation in those programs by individuals targeted by the statements,” Newsom wrote in the complaint.
Movses Bislamyan, the owner of the store whose sign is pictured in the video, told ABC7 Newsthat he saw about a 30% drop in business the day after the viral video was posted.
“I am really disappointed,” he told the station. “Recording my signs, my location, and talking about some kind of fraud going on here. We have nothing to do with it.”
The video comes as the Trump administration has launched a national effort to highlight allegations of federal funding fraud in Democratic-led states including Minnesota, California and New York.
A day after the video was posted, Newsom issued a statement on X saying that his office was reviewing reports that Oz was targeting the Armenian American community. “Given the historic sensitivities involved, we are taking these allegations seriously,” he wrote.
Oz fired back in his own statement on X, saying, “if there were a real defense for California’s fraud crisis, we’d hear it. CMS and law enforcement will keep doing the actual work: going after fraudsters, period.”
California has been investigating healthcare fraud since a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation that uncovered widespread Medicare fraud in the state’s booming but loosely regulated hospice industry. Between 2010 and 2020, the county’s hospices have multiplied sixfold, accounting for more than half of the state’s roughly 1,200 Medicare-certified providers, according to a Times analysis of federal healthcare data.
Scores of providers sprang up along a corridor stretching west from the San Gabriel Valley through the San Fernando Valley, which now has the highest concentration of hospices in the nation — an epicenter that sits along Victory Boulevard.
Since 2021 the state Department of Justice has charged 109 people with hospice-related fraud and filed 24 civil suits related to hospice fraud. In the last two years, 280 hospices have been shuttered with their licenses revoked, according to data from the California Department of Public Health, which oversees licensing.
The post Dr. Oz accused L.A. Armenians of fraud in a viral video. Newsom files civil rights complaint appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
