Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Trump's point man for Medicare and Medicaid at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, just went on the record and said what every taxpayer in America has been screaming into the void for a decade: blue state fraud is intentional. Not incompetence. Not oversight. A feature. His exact words: "I do think it's a feature for some of these states."
It's not that they CAN'T fix it. It's that the fraud IS the product. Beautiful.
Let's talk numbers, because the numbers are where this gets genuinely sickening. CMS is losing $100 billion per year to fraud. That's not a rounding error. That's not "waste" in the bureaucratic sense where somebody ordered too many paper clips. That is one hundred billion dollars a year — every single year — vanishing into a system that blue state governments have zero interest in repairing.
And we know exactly where the rot is thickest. Oz pointed to California, where CMS just yanked $1.3 billion in Medicaid funding after discovering the state had 800 hospice centers that needed to be shut down. Eight hundred. These weren't facilities providing end-of-life care to grandma. These were billing operations. Fraud factories with a medical license.
Then there's New York. Oz dropped a stat that should make every New Yorker throw their tax return out the window: the number one job in the entire state of New York is a personal care service attendant. Not finance. Not tech. Not construction. Personal care attendant — 500,000 of them. And as Oz explained, a massive chunk of that money is going straight to organized crime. "Think about how much money that is going to, in this case, organized" criminal networks, he said. We're talking about $58 million stolen by foreign criminals, including the Russian mafia.
Oz didn't mince it. "Republicans always suspected there was fraud of this magnitude," he told Just the News' John Solomon. Now they've got the receipts.
This is what we've been saying since long before DOGE was a twinkle in anyone's eye. These blue state governors aren't failing at governance — they're succeeding at grift. The bloated Medicaid rolls, the phantom hospice centers, the half-million "attendant" jobs that exist primarily as a pipeline for connected insiders and outright criminals — none of it is accidental. You don't accidentally build a system this corrupt. You architect it.
And here's the kicker that should make your blood pressure spike: Oz said that if they just fix the fraud and give people an affordability context, participation could double. Meaning the actual sick people — the ones Medicaid was designed to help — are getting squeezed out by the grifters. The fraud doesn't just cost money. It costs lives.
Vice President JD Vance and the broader DOGE-era accountability push have made this kind of transparency possible. For the first time, the adults are in the room with the receipts and the auditors, and the blue state governors who built these fraud machines are sweating.
They told us government was just bad at things. Turns out government is spectacular at things — when the thing is stealing your money.