Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Trump's point man for Medicare and Medicaid, just went on the record with something conservatives have known for years but nobody in Washington would actually say: the fraud in blue state welfare programs isn't incompetence. It's a feature. They built it this way on purpose.
Shocking, I know. Next you'll tell me water is wet.
"I do think it's a feature for some of these states," Oz told Just the News, describing a system so rotten that the people running it aren't even embarrassed anymore. And why would they be? When your state's number one employer is the grift itself, you're not going to fix it. You're going to protect it like a mother bear protects her cubs — except the cubs are stealing from taxpayers.
Let's talk numbers, because the numbers are absolutely staggering. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services loses an estimated $100 billion per year to fraud. That's not a typo. One hundred billion dollars, every single year, just walking out the door and into the pockets of criminals, con artists, and "faithful public servants" who happen to look the other way.
Oz has already started swinging the axe. His team has shut down 800 hospice centers that were operating as fraud mills. Vice President JD Vance led the charge to pull $1.3 billion in Medicaid funding from California after the state couldn't — or wouldn't — account for where the money was going. One criminal group alone stole $58 million and hid the proceeds in gold bullion. The Russian mafia was literally helping itself to American healthcare dollars.
Gold bullion. The Russian mafia. Your tax dollars at work.
"Republicans always suspected there was fraud of this magnitude," Oz said. But even he seemed taken aback by what they found once they actually started looking. The fraud wasn't hiding. It was sitting right there in plain sight, daring someone to do something about it.
Take New York State. Oz pointed out that the number one job in the entire state is a personal care service attendant. Not finance. Not tech. Not construction. Personal care service attendant — a position that exists almost entirely within the Medicaid system. "The No. 1 job in the entire state is a personal care service attendant," Oz said, noting that 500,000 people are employed in that role in New York alone.
Think about that for a second. Half a million people in one state employed by a single government healthcare program. That's not a safety net. That's an economy. And when your economy depends on Medicaid dollars flowing without scrutiny, the last thing you want is some guy from the federal government showing up with an auditor and a flashlight.
Which is exactly why they fought so hard to keep this from happening.
"If we just fix that, just give you an affordability context, it will double," Oz explained, describing how cleaning up the fraud would actually free up resources to help the people these programs were supposed to serve in the first place. The fraud had "created such a deep" rot that the legitimate beneficiaries were getting squeezed out by the grifters.
This is what Democrats do. They create a program, tell you it's for the vulnerable, let the connected insiders hollow it out from the inside, and then scream bloody murder when anyone tries to look at the books. The fraud IS the product. The "helping people" part is just the marketing brochure.
Dr. Oz is saying the quiet part out loud, and the blue state governors who've been running these Medicaid piggy banks for decades are about to have a very uncomfortable summer. As reported by Just the News, the DOGE-era accountability push isn't slowing down.
It's not that they can't fix it. It's that they never wanted to.
