Dr. Oz: Los Angeles County Has Become An Epicenter For Health Care Fraud In America
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, visited Los Angeles and discussed health care fraud.
DR. MEHMET OZ: 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. I’m in Van Nuys in Los Angeles, and this boarded up area above my head here is a big hospice center. There are apparently quite a few hospices around here, 42 within a four-block radius. And these guys stole $ 16 million, and listen carefully, the main guy went to jail for two years, stealing $ 16 million. It’s a good trade-off for a lot of folks. 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. What we have learned is there’s roughly $ 3.5 billion 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. You notice the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect. And it also highlights the fact that this is 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. Unfortunately, in California, there has not been a lot of attention on these problems. That’s going to change. The U.S. Attorney, the FBI, everyone’s 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 it seriously. The President’s not going to tolerate this anymore.
