Oz Unveils Nationwide Plan To Tackle Medicaid Fraud At Politico Summit

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz is taking his fraudbusting effort to all 50 states.

At POLITICO's Health Care Summit on Tuesday, Oz unveiled a nationwide plan to crack down on alleged Medicaid fraud, announcing his agency will require all states this week to submit a plan within 30 days on how they will revalidate Medicaid providers.

“We’re asking the states to own that problem… red and blue, all of them,” said Oz, a medical doctor who popularized his moniker, Dr. Oz, when he was a TV show host. As CMS administrator, Oz oversees the nation’s largest health insurance programs.

“If you don’t take it seriously, it indicates to us that we might have to take the audits… more aggressively,” he added.

Oz's comments arrive as the Trump administration and Congress lean in on anti-fraud messaging in an effort to blunt Democratic attacks on health care affordability ahead of the November midterm elections. Democrats are expected to leverage soaring Obamacare premiums and the more than $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts enacted in Trump’s domestic policy package last year against their GOP counterparts on the campaign trail.

In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump declared a “war on fraud” and put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the effort. Oz, the high-profile face of the campaign, has released a string of viral videos in recent weeks highlighting his agency’s crackdowns and launched probes mostly in Democratic-led states.

So far, Oz has sent letters to California, Florida, Maine and New York alleging fraud in their Medicaid programs. Last month, CMS approved a plan submitted by Minnesota to combat Medicaid fraud after threatening a $2 billion cut to future Medicaid payments to the state due to noncompliance.

But Oz suffered a major setback earlier this month when his agency admitted that an error in its analysis of fraud in New York’s Medicaid program grossly overstated the number of enrollees with personal care services, according to reports from the Associated Press. Oz had claimed that New York had provided 5 million Medicaid enrollees with personal care services, but the real number was around 450,000.

At Tuesday's summit, Oz defended the administration’s fraud-busting efforts and cuts to Medicaid, calling the upcoming work requirements a “beautiful tool” to help able-bodied Americans reenter the U.S. workforce.

“I love Medicaid. I cannot say that more fervently, and when you love something, you protect it. You don’t let it get defrauded,” he said.

Oz also dismissed Democratic concerns that the loss of enhanced Obamacare subsidies, which expired at the end of December, have left millions of Americans uninsured. A national enrollment snapshot released by CMS in January for 2026 Obamacare coverage found that signups this year declined by 1.2 million from last year to 22.9 million, a 5 percent drop.

“We didn’t see the mass departure off of the system,” said Oz. “Democrats are making this into a political football because they want to blame something on the Republicans on health care.”

Seattle Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat on the House Budget Committee, rejected the premise that combatting fraud required health care spending cuts, at POLITICO’s summit Tuesday morning.

“Americans don't want to be called fraudsters. To take away core benefits that people desperately need in order to crack down on some small group of people, that's not what Americans want,” she said.