The sheer number of hospice centers in a small area of Los Angeles raised suspicions of fraud, Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said in a video posted to social media on Jan. 27.
In the video, Oz tours a four-block radius that encompasses 42 hospice centers, and states, “Either there are a lot of people dying here, or you’ve got a fraudulent activity that is so good that everyone wants to get in on it.”
As of Jan. 29, Oz’s video had racked up 4.2 million views on X; his video expands on disclosures that Oz made to EpochTV earlier this month.
While the nation has focused on Somali-dominated fraud scandals in Minnesota—and two deadly clashes between agitators and federal immigration agents there this month—Oz has been pointing out that the Golden State’s fraud problems appear to be worse than those in the North Star State.
“Unfortunately, in California, there has not been a lot of attention on these problems. That’s going to change,” Oz said in the video.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and other agencies are “focused on the fact that, in this state, which has about $30 billion worth of home- and community-based services, most of it might be fraudulent.”
With such large amounts of money in question, Oz said, “We’re taking this seriously,” adding that President Donald Trump “is not going to tolerate this anymore.”
During a presidential Cabinet meeting on Jan. 29, Oz
reiterated that his agency will “claw back” as much money as possible from states with high fraud rates, such as Minnesota and California.
Oz, who recently visited both of the fraud-plagued states, previously told EpochTV, “What we’re seeing in Minnesota, which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people and puts them at risk … is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care.”
Federal prosecutors have estimated Minnesota’s social-welfare program fraud at $9 billion. Schemes there have been unfolding since at least 2022, resulting in dozens of people charged and convicted. Many more charges are expected as investigations continue.
Oz, in his video, estimated that fraudsters in Los Angeles have reaped $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars for hospice and home health care services that were never rendered.
“Quite a bit” of the schemes are being run by “the Russian-Armenian mafia,” Oz alleged.
During his recorded visit to Los Angeles’ Van Nuys neighborhood, he points out signage with lettering in “Cyrillic writing, Russian-Armenian writing, on both sides.”
He alleges that an organized crime ring systematically recruited hundreds of doctors to write false prescriptions and “tricked or paid” 100,000 patients “to give them their beneficiary numbers so they can perpetuate the fraud.”
“The criminals are just running the whole organization and quickly scurrying away when law enforcement does get around to prosecuting them,” Oz said.
Even when fraudsters have been convicted, they have been given comparatively lenient punishment, Oz said.
A man who stole $16 million in government-provided hospice-care funds spent two years behind bars for his crimes—a penalty that some people might consider “a pretty good tradeoff,” Oz said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom
accused Oz of making “a targeted attack on the Armenian community—throwing out accusations against businesses with no proof.” The governor wrote that statement Jan. 29 on X, two days after Oz’s post.
The Armenian National Committee of America—Western Region joined Newsom in denouncing Oz for tying the fraud to that ethnicity.
That group, in a post to its website, alleges that such statements would foster “harassment of Armenian-American businesses and professionals” and could lead to “discriminatory enforcement.”
In addition, Newsom asserted that he has taken aggressive fraud-fighting measures long before Oz pointed out the hospice fraud problem.
The governor signed a 2021 law, “banning all new hospice licenses to curb fraud, revoking 280+ licenses since,” he wrote on X.
