Dr. Oz, speaking from Van Nuys, Los Angeles, highlighted L.A. County as a central hub for healthcare fraud, particularly in hospice and home care. He pointed out 42 hospices crammed into a four-block area, with suspicious signs in Russian-Armenian script, noting that the massive fraud he has been exposing in California just got all the bigger.
Adding weight to the criticism, one case cited in which fraudsters stole $16 million but received only 2 years in prison. Oz linked much of the estimated $3.5 billion in local fraud to the Russian-Armenian mafia, involving recruited doctors writing false prescriptions and exploiting 100,000 patients’ beneficiary numbers.
Starting the flurry of information that really exposed a huge amount of fraud, Dr. Oz noted, “L.A. County has become an epicenter for health care fraud in America. Criminals have corrupted the system so much that fraud is now almost expected. President Trump has made it clear: we will not tolerate the patient harm or taxpayer-funded theft any longer. More to come.”
Starting the clip, the famous doctor explained the situation from the back seat of a car. Pointing to signs, he said, “So you can see, these are medical buildings. They’ve got Cyrillic writing, Russian Armenian writing, on both sides. There’s lots of action, it seems.”
“I don’t know how many patients are getting care, but in this four-block area in Los Angeles, there are 42 hospices. So 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,” he said to add more context.
Adding context, he stated, “I’m in Van Nuys in Los Angeles, and this boarded up area above my head here is a big hospice center that apparently quite a few hospices around here, 42 within a four block radius, and these guys stole $16 million listen carefully, the main guy went to jail for two years stealing $16 million which is a good trade off for a lot of folks.”
Tying this incident to scandals in Minnesota, he added, “And if you look at it, it’s pretty in the script. There wasn’t anyone really in there. They weren’t doing any services. They just got an address they could claim was a hospice. And then they ran the business claiming people were at home getting services, which they really weren’t.”
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Exploring connections to shadowy organized crime, he added, “What we have learned is there’s roughly three and a half billion dollars of fraud taking place here in Los Angeles, in hospice and home care. It’s run quite a bit of it by the Russian Armenian mafia.”
Building on this point, he added, “You notice the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect, and it also highlights the fact that this is sort of an organized crime mafia deal, where you’ve got folks who have systemically recruited doctors to write false prescriptions, hundreds of doctors participating.”
“They’ve got 100,000 patients who they’ve tricked or paid to give them their beneficiary numbers so they can perpetuate the fraud, and then the criminals are just running the whole organization and quickly scurrying away when law enforcement does get around to prosecuting them,” he recounted.
Watch the clip here:
Concluding his comments, Oz noted, “Unfortunately, in California, there has not been a lot of attention on these problems. That’s going to change the US. The attorney, the FBI, and everyone are now 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. Those are big numbers, and we’re taking this seriously. The president’s not going to tolerate this anymore.”
Featured image from embedded video