The Trump administration is “aggressively” targeting the Russian and Armenian mob to crack down on medical fraud in California, Medicaid czar Dr. Mehmet Oz said, threatening a major campaign against the scheming gangsters.
The former TV doctor offered a stark warning Monday that federal officials are working to take down corrupted doctors who have fallen in league with criminals allegedly siphoning billions through medical schemes in the Golden State.
“This mafia seems to have taken over the system. They corrupted doctors, they’ve normalized fraud so that everyone sort of expects it, but the magnitude of it is so great that we have to take it out aggressively,” Oz, the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), said in a video shared on social media.
“It’s a focus area for CMS and this administration, and President Trump is not going to tolerate taxpayer dollars being stolen because people aren’t paying attention anymore,” he added.
The video builds upon the news Oz broke earlier this month regarding a “sevenfold” increase in hospice care in Los Angeles over the last five years—a skyrocketing rate that sparked an investigation. “That doesn’t happen naturally,” he said at the time.
The former TV doctor pointed the finger at foreign gangsters, likely from Russia or Armenia, who are corrupting doctors and defrauding the medical system by enrolling ineligible patients into hospice care and billing for services not rendered.
At least 100,000 Medicare numbers had been handed over after being convinced by “100 bad doctors” that they were dying. In Los Angeles County alone, which Oz called the “epicenter” of the scheme, organized crime allegedly milked more than $3.5 billion.
Oz claimed that the “scale is huge” in California and makes Medicaid fraud in Minnesota pale in comparison. The former surgeon has been going head-to-head with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz since last month, withholding Medicaid funding until the Midwestern state restores “the integrity” of its program.
“Our staff at CMS told me they’ve never seen anything like this in Medicaid, and everyone from Gov. Tim Walz on down needs to be investigated, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel,” Oz said last month.
—
Download The California Post app, and follow us on social media for more updates.
https://nypost.com/2026/01/26/us-news/dr-oz-promises-to-go-after-mafia-stealing-billions-through-cali-hospice-fraud/