Dr. Mehmet Oz made a glaring mistake when announcing a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program, undermining the Trump administration’s crusade to tackle abuse of federal benefits programs in blue states.
Oz, who serves as President Donald Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made the error last month in a social media video and letter to New York’s Democratic governor.
He claimed that New York’s Medicaid program provided 5 million people with personal care services, which assist people in need with basic activities such as bathing, grooming, and meal preparation.
That would have meant nearly three-quarters of the state’s 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees were using the program.
“That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in the video, which was accompanied by a post saying that New York needed to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”
In fact, about 450,000 New Yorkers used the personal care services last year, or 6 to 7 percent of Medicaid enrollees, a CMS spokesman admitted to the Associated Press this week.
The agency had misidentified New York’s approach to billing codes and had since refined its methodology, spokesperson Chris Krepich told the AP.
The mistake prompted health analysts to question how many of the Trump administration’s fraud investigations—which mostly target Democrat-led states—are based on bad information.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order creating an anti-fraud task force across federal benefit programs led by Vice President JD Vance.
The New York mistake highlighted the administration’s tendency to launch attacks before verifying information, according to the AP.
“The initial claim by CMS was patently false, and are glad they now admit it,” a spokesperson for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement.
Michael Kinnucan, a senior health policy adviser at the Fiscal Policy Institute who first flagged the inaccuracy, told the AP, “These numbers could have been cleared up in a phone call, so it’s really slapdash.”
Despite the mistake, CMS is moving forward with its investigation, which is also concerned that New York’s program spends more per beneficiary and per resident than the average state, has high personal care spending, and employs record numbers of personal care aides.
New York has countered that its spending reflects the high costs for services in New York and a policy choice to provide comprehensive at-home care.
In his video, Oz claimed that New York had made its screening for personal care eligibility “more lenient” by allowing patients to qualify based on problems like being “easily distracted.”
The director of the health law unit at the Legal Aid Society told the AP the program requirements have actually become stricter, not more lenient, and that “easily distracted” does not appear anywhere as a program qualification.
Oz also described personal care services as “something that our families would normally do for us, like carrying groceries.”
A quadriplegic woman with cerebral palsy told the AP that it was offensive to suggest that all Medicaid beneficiaries have family members who can care for their relatives full-time, indefinitely, and without compensation.
The Daily Beast has reached out to CMS for comment.
