Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is conducting a public campaign to expose what he claims is Medicaid fraud in Los Angeles and across California.
But his presence is not being taken seriously by the state’s leaders, Politico reported.
Since assuming his position, Oz has prioritized investigating fraudulent billing by nursing homes, in-home health agencies, and other healthcare providers. He has undertaken a multi-state tour visiting Minnesota, Florida, and Los Angeles to publicize these efforts.
During a social media video recorded in Los Angeles this week, Oz stated: “In California, there has not been a lot of attention on these problems, but that’s going to change.” The video was filmed outside a shuttered hospice company office, which Oz claimed had been improperly billing the federal government.
But the state’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom characterized Oz’s campaign as political theater — and put down the celebrity doctor with a brutally dismissive response.
“We don’t take Dr. Ozseriously,” his spokesperson, Izzy Gardon told Politico Friday.
“We will respond as appropriate, but nothing he says is worth our time. If there’s something substantive, then we’ll consider it.”
Gardon compared the situation to recent Minnesota cases where fraud by childcare centers run by Somali-Americans received renewed attention, prompting the Trump administration to freeze federal childcare payments.
Oz has generated controversy within Los Angeles’s Armenian community by focusing on Armenian and Russian-operated businesses in his videos, highlighting Cyrillic lettering on storefronts and attributing alleged fraud to Armenian and Russian organized crime groups.
Oz conducted Los Angeles visits while attending the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, utilizing the opportunity to film social media content highlighting alleged fraudulent practices.
California’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, has faced federal fraud investigations since Trump returned to office. Oz’s office stated that California is not being uniquely targeted but acknowledged that the state’s program contains fraud patterns in hospice and home health sectors. Oz indicated that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services identified $1.6 billion in federal funds that California allocated to undocumented immigrant care, which CMS is currently recouping.
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