Dr. Oz Says $100 Billion a Year Is Lost to Medicare and Medicaid Fraud | Record Rewind

Greta Wire

Dr. Mehmet Oz discusses Medicare and Medicaid fraud, estimating $100 billion in annual losses, while highlighting progress in stopping fraud

Key takeaways

• Medicare and Medicaid fraud costs approximately $100 billion annually, with $42 billion in questionable payments already stopped by CMS.
• Chronic illness—driven largely by obesity and poor diet—accounts for two-thirds of U.S. healthcare spending.

Main topics

• Medicare and Medicaid fraud
• Chronic illness and healthcare costs

Notable quotes

"We would stabilize the Medicare trust fund, double this life expectancy... if we take the fraud out of the system."

Conclusion

Dr. Oz emphasizes that tackling fraud, reducing bureaucracy, improving a

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) The Greta Wire podcast is presented Speaker 1 (0:02) by Paramount+. On Speaker 2 (0:05) September 18th, prepare for uncivil war. Mobland, the hit crime series from the underworld of Guy Ritchie, returns to Paramount+. The Harrigans are back and their empire is spiraling into chaos from the inside out. As power plays, fractured loyalties, and reckless decisions collide, Fixer Harry is left to clean up the fallout. Don't miss Mobland starring Tom Hardy, Piers Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Speaker 1 (0:32) The Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and who is a cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Mehmet Oz joins me. Nice to see you, sir. And we just came out of that soundbite of Senator John Fetterman, who you know very well. You ran for Senate in Pennsylvania. Were you surprised to see him in a video at the Republican Midterm Convention? Speaker 3 (0:54) Well, he's been expressing common-sense sentiments now for quite a while, so no. And it's a big tent for the Republican Party, as you know. The reason that we're conservatives is because we respect and treasure the wisdom gained through lots of mistakes made by our forefathers. The unfortunate reality of socialism is that experiment has been tried and found wanting. It often is generated from the faculty lounge with people with tweed jackets smoking their pipe. But those practical insights don't translate to working-class individuals. In this country, frankly, any... anywhere else. And so having John Fetterman, you mentioned David McCormick. I'm from Pennsylvania. As you mentioned, all of us feel the same way, which is, we have got lots of work to do. Stop playing around with failed ideology, and let's actually get to the root cause of issues. And I was honored to speak before the president last night, and we covered three important topics. The first was the remarkable drop in drug prices, the largest ever in 60-plus years, a $50 billion investment in rural America, so they don't pay a mortality rate. penalty for just living in a zip code that's not favored. And we talked about fraud, waste, and abuse. All those things drive affordability and access for Americans who desperately want both. Speaker 1 (2:04) Can you give me some idea of—I want to focus in on the fraud, because I know that there's been a lot of effort to knock out the fraud. Can you give me an estimate of how bad it is and what inroads have been made for the last two years and what you expect in the next two years? Speaker 3 (2:20) It's about $100 billion a year. To put that in context, we would stabilize the Medicare trust fund, double this life expectancy, so we'd be there for you and hopefully even your children if we take the fraud out of the system. The big problem is, during COVID, the Biden administration taught America and fraudsters that if you wanted to use the federal government as a piggy bank, it was yours. And so with weak rules and an inability to enforce basic common sense measures, we ended up allowing both. vulnerable Americans to get taken advantage of over and again. And that leads to a corruption that rocks the very foundation of our society. So we've already stopped $42 billion from leaving my building, the CMS building, which runs Medicare and Medicaid, just by being aggressive about making sure we check who's taking the money. But the president created an all-government approach, led by Vice President Vance, that ensures that I work with Treasury and I work with the Department of Justice, all of us on the same team, and we get states involved. That's how you stop fraud. Guess what? These criminals, they'll just go defraud somewhere else. They're not going away. I just want them to stop stealing from the American people. Because when they steal from your welfare programs, from your Social Security and from Medicare and Medicaid, they're actually not just stealing your money. They're stealing your health and they're stealing our trust. And that is catastrophic. Speaker 1 (3:38) IN ADDITION