Despite Donald Trump’s troubled history with fraud allegations, the president and his team have spent the last few months leaning into the idea that they are well suited to a crusade against the misuse of public resources. To that end, the White House has appointed a “fraud czar,” and in Trump’s recent State of the Union address, he announced what he described as a “war on fraud.”
More recently, the administration also formed a fraud “task force,” to be led by Vice President JD Vance, that Trump said would target fraud “primarily in those Blue States,” including New York.
The administration has never even tried to produce evidence to substantiate claims that fraud is more common in Democratic-led states, but the president has never been especially interested in proof.
As these efforts took shape, Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, launched a salvo that appeared rather serious. Last month, the former television personality said New York’s Medicaid program last year provided personal care services, covering things such as bathing and meal preparation, to roughly 5 million people.
“That level of utilization is unheard of,” Oz said in a social media video, in which he levied the allegations. He added that New York needs to “come clean about its Medicaid program.”
Taken at face value, Oz’s accusations might have seemed rather serious. There are 6.8 million New Yorkers enrolled in Medicaid, and if 5 million of them received personal care services last year, it would raise legitimate questions.
But the CMS chief was wrong. The number wasn’t 5 million, it was 450,000. Oz was off by a factor of 11. (He also made false claims about eligibility for the program. The video he posted remains online as of this writing.)
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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