BOMBSHELL: Billions Saved as Dr. Oz Cracks Down on…

The Trump administration is putting numbers behind its promise to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in America’s healthcare entitlement programs, and the figures are staggering. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television personality turned Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been touting a sweeping anti fraud campaign that officials say has intercepted or blocked tens of billions of taxpayer dollars from flowing to bad actors across Medicare and Medicaid.

According to CMS reporting cited by Oz, the agency logged 41.9 billion dollars in Medicare program integrity savings in 2025 alone, a 59 percent jump from the 26.3 billion dollars recovered the year before. That surge came as the Trump administration ramped up scrutiny of billing patterns, provider enrollment, and claims that officials say had gone unchecked for years under previous administrations.

Oz, who estimates that fraud, waste and abuse across Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program totals roughly 100 billion dollars a year, has made this issue the centerpiece of his tenure at CMS. He has argued repeatedly that cleaning up these programs is the single most effective way to make healthcare more affordable for law-abiding American taxpayers and the vulnerable populations these programs were designed to serve.

The crackdown has not been limited to talk. Working alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Oz has moved aggressively against states that federal officials believe have been lax in policing their Medicaid rolls.

In late July, CMS announced it was deferring more than 867 million dollars in federal Medicaid payments to California and roughly 199 million dollars to Minnesota, pending additional documentation on claims flagged as high risk for fraud.

Kennedy did not mince words when announcing the deferrals. He said Medicaid exists to serve vulnerable Americans, not to bankroll unsupported claims, and made clear that states receiving federal Medicaid funding must demonstrate that every dollar meets federal requirements. When they cannot, the federal government will not release the funds until they do.

Oz has described the new posture at CMS as a proactive approach to fraud prevention, moving away from the old pay and chase model where the government paid claims first and tried to claw back stolen money later, often unsuccessfully.

He has said plainly that if a claim smells like fraud, CMS will not pay for it anymore, a blunt approach that stands in sharp contrast to the reactive posture federal health agencies have taken for decades.

Minnesota has been a particular focus of the administration’s efforts. CMS officials say a review of claims tied to 14 Medicaid programs in the state raised red flags, and the state was pushed to revalidate more than 5,500 social service providers in a fraction of the time such reviews normally take. By the end of May, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services had disenrolled more than 3,400 businesses and nonprofits from high risk programs.

The state’s exposure runs even deeper. Federal officials have said Minnesota could face deferrals of more than 2 billion dollars in payments over the coming year if it fails to satisfy a corrective action plan, and the state has already had roughly 259 million dollars in Medicaid funds halted over claims involving beneficiaries who officials say lacked satisfactory immigration status.

Two Minnesota programs in particular drew fire from Oz. The Housing Stabilization Services program was designed to cost taxpayers about 2.6 million dollars a year but ballooned to more than 100 million dollars in a single year. A separate program covering autism therapy exploded from roughly 3 million dollars in 2018 to nearly 400 million dollars just a few years later.

Oz has alleged that scammers used stolen taxpayer money to buy luxury cars and overseas property, and even suggested some funds may have reached the terrorist group al Shabaab.

Oz did not spare Minnesota’s Democratic leadership in his criticism, calling the situation a clear dereliction of duty and saying everyone from Governor Tim Walz on down needed to be investigated for being asleep at the wheel while the fraud metastasized.

New York has also come under the microscope. Oz sent Governor Kathy Hochul a letter with 50 pointed questions about the state’s 100 billion dollar Medicaid program, citing a spike in adult day care spending that more than doubled in a matter of months alongside a federal prosecution involving a 68 million dollar kickback scheme at adult care centers. He gave Hochul’s team 30 days to respond with a credible corrective action plan or face the same kind of payment deferrals imposed on Minnesota and California.

Beyond individual state actions, CMS has taken system wide steps to close the door on fraud before it starts. The agency imposed a six month moratorium on new Medicare enrollments for suppliers of durable medical equipment, prosthetics and orthotics nationwide, a category long associated with billing schemes.

It also announced a similar moratorium on new hospice and home health provider enrollments after what Oz called systemic and deeply troubling fraud that exploited some of Medicare’s most vulnerable patients.

In April, Oz directed all 50 governors, not just those in Democrat controlled states, to submit plans within 30 days for revalidating Medicaid providers in high risk categories. The message was clear that no state, regardless of political control, would be exempt from the new scrutiny.

Predictably, the pushback from Democratic officials has been fierce. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office dismissed the payment deferral as a recycled political stunt, insisting the state is saving taxpayer money by keeping seniors and the disabled out of costlier nursing homes. Minnesota officials have likewise complained that CMS has not adequately explained how it calculated some of its fraud estimates.

Supporters of the crackdown counter that this kind of resistance from blue state governors is exactly what one would expect from officials who have allowed these programs to balloon unchecked for years. They note that Medicaid Fraud Control Units nationwide recovered 1.2 billion dollars in criminal convictions in fiscal year 2025 alone, a figure that only scratches the surface of a program that spends roughly 1 trillion dollars a year.

It is also worth noting that the effort to use data analytics to catch fraudulent billing patterns did not begin under President Trump.

The Government Accountability Office has reported that CMS stopped nearly 11.9 billion dollars in potentially fraudulent Medicare payments between 2022 and 2024, under the Biden administration. But the pace and aggressiveness of enforcement have unmistakably accelerated since Trump returned to office, with the Vance led anti fraud task force adding another layer of coordination across federal benefit programs.