Lights, Camera, Fraud: Dr. Oz Takes Fraud-busting On The Road

Dr. Oz has a show again.

But instead of promoting health supplements and weight loss tips, he’s explaining the myriad ways the Trump administration is fighting waste, fraud and abuse in health care.

And while the topic may have changed — and the videos air on social media, not cable television — the Trump administration hopes the effect is just the same: a rapt audience eager to believe, and enthralled with the simple way he explains complex topics.

“In this four block area of Los Angeles there are 42 hospices,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz says in a run-and-gun video from his motorcade as he’s driven through the Van Nuys neighborhood. “So either there are a lot of people dying here, or you got a fraudulent activity that is so good that everyone wants to get in on it."

The clip garnered over 4.6 million views on X — viral, as far as CMS administrators go.

It’s part of a growing cadre of videos — which show Oz in Minnesota, California and Florida pointing out enforcement actions as well as how fraud is committed — that come as the GOP seeks to take back the message on health affordability. They hope to blunt Democrats’ expected attacks over Medicaid cuts, rising health premiums and axed federal programs.

Fraud-busting “takes the whole thing back,” said an administration official, granted anonymity to talk about its health care strategy.

“The premise of the Democrats’ political messaging on health care is we'll fight for you, the underdog,” the official said.

Highlighting anti-fraud efforts gives Republicans ground on that same front, the official said, because the administration is going after people who are making money off of programs that are meant to help low-income Americans.

On Wednesday, Oz joined Vice President JD Vance to announce that the administration will withhold another $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota, part of ongoing efforts to reel in alleged welfare grifts in the state. Gov. Tim Walz said the move was part of a “campaign of retribution” against blue states and would be “devastating” for vulnerable people across Minnesota.

“We’re going to fix these issues,” Oz said. “We believe we are spending $300 billion a year in health care in this country on fraudulent, abusive or wasteful purposes.”

The announcement followed President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, during which he appointed Vance to lead the “war on fraud” and said the administration was “working on it like you wouldn’t believe.”

Though much of the early focus on welfare fraud has been on Democrat-led states, and the task force comes as the White House gears up for the midterms, Vance suggested highlighting their work on fraud and taking a harder stance on Minnesota was about policy, not politics.

“I'm not really worried about the politics,” Vance said. “I'm worried about the justice of it all. I think it's offensive that American taxpayers pay into these programs and they are defrauded.”

Efforts to withhold funds for Minnesota, California and a handful of other Democrat-led states over allegations of welfare fraud have so far been blocked by the courts, but the White House has only continued to put more muscle behind its “war on fraud.”

The president’s 2024 campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, described the strategy in a recent political panel: if “the territory that we're on is taxes, or it's spending or it's fraud, I'll take that any day of the week. I don't want to have a battle on health care,” he said at an event hosted by Arizona State University’s Institute of Politics in late January.

But that’s exactly where Democrats want to go.

“They’re making your life harder, they’re making your life more expensive, they’re even making it more difficult for you to see a doctor,” Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said in her rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Democrats — who polls consistently show have more trust from voters to handle health care overall — are eager to remind voters that the GOP’s signature tax cuts, signed into law last summer, were paid for in part by adding additional work requirements to Medicaid, which will result in 10 million fewer people on the rolls over the next 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found.

They also point to the longest government shut down in history, a fight that was waged, in part, over extending Obamacare subsidies, which expired in January. Congress failed to extend those subsidies, which led to premiums doubling for millions of Americans, but Democrats did succeed in shining a light on the issue.

But Republicans argue that they’re cutting the fat from government health care so it can serve the people it’s supposed to, not send money out the door to fraudsters. Oz’s on-the-ground videos help draw attention to that point, said Brian Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute and a health adviser to Trump in his first term.

“I think targeting fraud is long overdue. It's exactly the right policy approach, and it resonates with the American people,” Blase said.

“It's good policy, and I think it's very good politics,” Blase said, adding that it was an “effective argument” against Democrats railing against health care cuts.

But in tackling fraud, specifically by withholding payments from states or limiting Americans who can enroll in health care, the administration risks damaging a social safety net program that is widely popular among both Democrats and Republicans.

In polling from KFF, a nonpartisan health research group, nearly half of Americans said the government isn’t spending enough on Medicaid.

Oz, who has highlighted fraud throughout his yearlong tenure, said Wednesday that he’s driven to root out fraud after “personally witness[ing] what it's like to see something you know is wrong and wonder why no one tried to fix it.”

In a statement, CMS spokesperson Christopher Krepich underscored that Oz’s continuous efforts on health care fraud go beyond the recent White House focus.

“He is pursuing it relentlessly through aggressive and innovative actions by CMS and has spoken about it prolifically and consistently for the past 10 months in speeches, on interviews, and on social media because the American people deserve to know the facts about the types of fraud, where they are occurring, and what CMS is doing with partners to halt it,” Krepich said.

The amount of fraud in government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act is hard to pin down but the consensus is it is in the billions per year. Last year, a multi-agency investigation identified $14 billion in fraud across government insurance programs, the largest in history.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said in December that at least half of the $18 billion worth of federal payments made to Minnesota programs since 2018 could be fraudulent and the Department of Justice has charged dozens of defendants in Minnesota fraud-related cases.

Unprecedented moves to fight fraud

Last month, CMS took the unprecedented step of withholding $2 billion in future Medicaid funding to Minnesota. State officials scrambled to put together a plan to address CMS’ concerns, but CMS rejected it as insufficient and delivered the funding cut in a letter on Jan. 6., calling the state “substantially out of compliance.”

CMS has never used this authority, according to an analysis from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. Normally, CMS seeks to claw back funding that has already gone to fraudsters, or works out an agreement with a state before resorting to broad funding cuts.

The funding, for now, continues while the state appeals. The state is entitled to a hearing held by an HHS official, which has not been scheduled yet. It’s not clear how the latest decision to withhold an additional $259 million will play out, or if the state will appeal it, too.

Democrats charge that Trump is unfairly targeting the state for political reasons.

“This is part of their playbook,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told POLITICO earlier this month. “They make up new rules to go after their political enemies.”

Smith said Minnesota has charged and convicted 58 people for fraud in recent years and acknowledged more work is needed. But withholding federal dollars “only ends up hurting individuals,” she said.

The state’s Department of Human Services said Wednesday it had discontinued a housing program, frozen new high-risk providers and increased audits and site visits. But Human Services Commissioner Shireen Gandhi called Oz’s move “part of a broad and sustained attack by the federal government on Medicaid in Minnesota.”

Next stop

Oz has also escalated his attacks on California in recent months. One of his most popular videos targeted the state’s regulation of hospice facilities, which he argued were allowed to proliferate from lax state controls.

CMS has sent California a letter asking for more information on its efforts to combat fraud. State officials say they have revoked more than 280 hospice licenses over the past two years and have not issued new licenses since a 2021 state law imposed tighter restrictions.

Oz has said that if the state fails to adequately respond, CMS could defer “hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom said last month that it’s ironic the Trump administration is taking such an interest in fraud given how it has systematically defunded the agencies and laid off the bureaucrats in charge of fighting it.

The president, early in his second term, signed an executive order that removed 17 inspectors general, watchdogs who are appointed to federal agencies to investigate misuses of taxpayer dollars, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Medicaid program.

“It’s rich to see the Trump administration suddenly talking tough on hospice fraud after pulling back federal oversight just last year,” Newsom said.

Tackling Medicare

The Trump administration has largely focused its public campaigns on Democrat-governed states like California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Maine, though there are documented instances of fraud in Republican states, too. CMS has enhanced oversight of newly enrolled hospices in six states: Arizona, Ohio, Nevada, California, Texas and Georgia.

And Oz did do one video from Florida, the president’s home state.

However, Oz did not call out Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, who ran against Donald Trump in 2024. He instead highlighted a persistent area of fraud in Medicare: equipment suppliers.

Federal data show Medicare provided $1.9 billion in improper payments for durable medical equipment in 2024. In one instance, some suppliers billed Medicare for continuous glucose monitors that never got to the patient, according to information from CMS.

Oz has previously gone after Medicare fraud, including drastically cutting reimbursement for pricey wound care treatments called skin substitutes. Medicare spending on the substitutes surged from $259 million in 2019 to more than $10 billion in 2024.

Oz announced Wednesday that CMS is imposing a six-month freeze on new enrollment of medical equipment suppliers into Medicare. His latest video, out Thursday, highlighted the problem, and explained why the freeze was necessary.

Arresting people after they've stolen just isn’t enough, he said.

“We don’t want to catch bad actors with their hands in the cookie jar,” Oz said. “We want to padlock the jar and let them starve.”