SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For weeks, Mehmet Oz has been waging a public feud with California leaders over health care fraud, accusing the blue state of failing to adequately combat such abuse.
Oz, who heads the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, alleged that there was approximately $3.5 billion of fraud in the hospice and home health care industry in Los Angeles County alone. “This administration under President [Donald] Trump is not going to tolerate taxpayer dollars being stolen because people aren’t paying attention anymore. We’re focused on this,” Oz said. He claimed the fraud was largely orchestrated by the “Russian, Armenian mafia” and said that most of the money spent on home and community-based services across California “might be fraudulent.”
However, CMS clarified that not all billing activities referenced by Oz were presumed to be improper. And a review of the most recent available data shows that there are hotbeds of health care fraud across the country and across practice areas, most of them allegedly perpetrated by health insurers and other domestic actors, and that California outperforms most other states in recovering fraud dollars.
As the temperature heats up in the conflict between the Trump administration and California, a handful of Republican sta …