Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday filed a civil rights complaint against Dr. Mehmet Oz, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, after Oz posted a video accusing Armenian criminal groups of widespread health care fraud in Los Angeles.
The video shows Oz walking through a part of Van Nuys where he says $3.5 billion in medical fraud is being perpetrated by hospice and home care businesses, which he says is “run, in part, by the Russian mafia in Armenia.”
At one point in the video, posted Tuesday on official social media accounts, Oz stands in front of the bakery’s Cyrillic signs and says, “you notice that the words and language behind me are from that language and it also highlights the fact that this is a mafia deal for organized crime.”
In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom called on the agency to investigate Dr. Oz’s “baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California.”
“Such racially charged and false statements made by anyone involved in the administration of these critical health care programs pose a significant risk to participation in those programs by the individuals targeted by the statements,” Newsom wrote in the complaint.
Movses Biislamyan, the owner of the store whose sign was shown in the video, told ABC7 News that he saw a 30% drop in business the day after the video was posted.
“I’m really disappointed,” he told the station. “Recording my signs, my location, and talking about some kind of fraud going on here. We have nothing to do with it.”
The video comes as the Trump administration launched a national effort to highlight alleged federal fraud in Democratic-led states including Minnesota, California and New York.
A day after the video was posted, Newsom released a statement on X saying his office was reviewing reports that Oz targeted the Armenian American community. “Due to the historical sensitivities involved, we take these allegations very seriously,” he wrote.
Oz fired back in his statement to X, saying, “if there was a real defense to California’s fraud problem, we would hear it. CMS and law enforcement will continue to do the real work: going after fraudsters, period.”
California has been investigating health care fraud since 2020 in a 2020 Los Angeles Times investigation that found widespread Medicare fraud in a dominant but poorly regulated health care industry. Between 2010 and 2020, hospice facilities in the region increased sixfold, accounting for more than half of the state’s nearly 1,200 Medicare-certified providers, according to a Times analysis of federal health care data.
Most of the suppliers came from a corridor that stretched west from the San Gabriel Valley through the San Fernando Valley, which now has the nation’s highest death toll — a landmark that sits along Victory Boulevard.
As of 2021, the state Department of Justice has charged 109 people with hospice-related fraud and filed 24 hospital-related fraud charges. In the past two years, 280 nursing homes have closed and had their licenses revoked, according to data from the California Department of Public Health, which oversees licensing.
