NY State Per Resident Has The Highest Expenditures For Medicaid By Far In The Country

0:00 Speaker 1 Good morning, America. This is John Cats and Tits and I’m here on a Sunday morning with doctor Oz. Doctor Oz is a longtime friend and we’ve known each other for almost forever, and he is now the director of the Medicare and Medicaid divisions of our country. He has a lot of concerns, a lot of concerns, and the

0:23 concerns being fraud. We all want to take care of our elderly, all our elderly. We want every elderly person to live long and prosper, as my friend doctor Michelo says, but we don’t want to have fraud. And that’s one of the important things. And President Trump, besides his normal work, has given him an assignment that there’s excessive fraud in

0:51 the system. How do we take care of it? Well, you know the famous does. Yeah, you had a career in medicine. People used to fly around our entire world to come see you to have surgery. And you had a career in television, you had a career in you’re an author, and now you’re in charge of saving the

1:19 world medicine wise. And tell me how you feel about that.

1:22 Speaker 2 It’s the best job I’ve ever had and all the other jobs you mentioned I adored as well. But when you have so many people completely aligned to try to make the country healthier and better and stronger and appreciate the magnificence of what America has been and why our health is part of that story, you get passionate. I mean,

1:41 I get a very morning, cannot wait to get to work. I’m surrounded by folks, even the full time, long term bureaucrats, that’s what they would be called.

1:50 Speaker 3 They actually are passionate.

1:51 Speaker 2 They’ve given up high paying jobs outside of government because I run to centertial Medicare Medicaid. So these guys are there insurance experts, they are actuarials. They understand and how to run massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid. If you put them together, it’s almost two trillion dollars of expenditures.

2:07 It’s the largest bucket of money that our government spends, and it’s the crown jewel of our social safety net program, which is why the President is so passionate, as you said, about making sure we protected. If you truly love our children, fifty three percent of kids in America are born into Medicaid.

2:23 If you truly or chip if you truly love our seniors, as you mentioned, you want them to be healthy. But if you have fraud that is rotting the foundations of the system, then the program won’t be there when people need it. And so because the President and quote them, loves and cherishes Medicare, because we want to protect Medicaid,

2:42 we’ve gotten serious about fraud that has been around for a while, but after COVID really exploded and its important. And now overall, if you included in commercial insurance, maybe three hundred billion dollars is lost through fraud, waste, and abuse.

2:57 Just in Medicare and Medicaid, we estimated about one hundred billion dollars. The magnitude of this money and its impact on our affordability of healthcare is important to highlight. The average person watching right now, they’re family spending about twenty seven thousand dollars for health care. They pay out of pocket maybe seven thousand, but a lot of that’s driven

3:15 by the fraud. You’re paying for bad people to steal money. And again, the insurance companies aren’t paying it out of their pockets, They’re going to charge you for it. And because we have government rules that we can our ability to enforce the sanctity the integrity of Medicare and Medicaid.

3:31 And because some governors have not been serious about this problem. And I’m specifically going to single out Waltson Minnesota, Gavin newst in California, governedor Hoco here in New York where we sit today. We have the problem in Maine, but we also have problems in red states. But nevertheless, we have got to be able to get arms around these issues.

3:50 And I’ll give you one of them. What’s going to blow your mind. New York State per per resident has the highest expenditures for medicaid by far of any state.

4:01 Speaker 1 I understand, it’s eighty percent higher than the average of the country.

4:05 Speaker 3 Can you imagine that?

4:06 Speaker 1 I understand that Florida that has twenty four million people versus New York State that’s down to nineteen point eight million people, and you’ve got more elderly in Florida. We all know that that Florida twenty twenty four was twenty twenty five thirty three billion, and New York State was one hundred billion dollars. How can that happen?

4:34 Speaker 2 Well, that’s the question we should be asking our leaders. I’ll give you some clues. I think it is political patronage, and it’s a jobs program. Why do I think that the number one job in New York State, The number one job is not retail anymore. Number one job is personal care services. And these are directed by the patients.

4:52 So if you’re on Medicaid and you’re having problems bouncing your checkbook or you know, having dealing, you know, getting overwhelmed by stuff, you can actually hire somebody of the state will do it for you, and they’ll bring them in and they’ll help you get through your day. Now, sometimes you need that, right, It’s better than having you

5:09 go to a nursing home. But the amount of people put into these jobs, it’s so beyond what any other state of considers doing that at least someone ought to be looking and why this is happening, And there are major concerns being raised about why New York State would allow that many people to be hired at these jobs

5:30 that historically your family would do for you.

5:33 Speaker 1 But triple the amount of Florida. It was just mind boggling when I saw it, the numbers. And you know, we all want all our elderly people, and you know I’m older than you, but we’re both getting up there at some point. We care about the elderly. We want them to get the right healthcare, but fraud is not acceptable.

5:56 Speaker 2 Well, this took in New York States is a good example. There are these places you go when you get older for rehab or dietary advice or just to hang out. There’s all these older homes, senior living facilities, but they’re they’re outpatient.

6:09 Speaker 3 You just go there, stay for a little while, and then go back home.

6:12 Speaker 2 And there’s about one point two billion spent in New York State, but seems like it’s all actually being spent in Brooklyn and Queens. So what’s giving It turns out there have been some now federal investigations that have proven there’s tens of millions of dollars being stolen by the proprieties.

6:28 These are small time shops. If you drive down the road and you know, the middle of Queens, you’d see these shops. You wouldn’t think much of them. They’re generating, you know, sixty seventy million dollars of bills. Now, could you truly take care of that many seniors? What are you actually doing for them? These are manufactured and by

6:44 the way, it’s not just here in New York State. It’s you know, we saw what happened in Minnesota, where autism services were projected to be about three million dollars a year. They would pay moms to lie that their children had autism. Thousand dollars if you lie, you and say your kid has autism them So we can now

7:01 build the government, which is basically the federal government because if they build a state, but the state passes the bill to the federal to defense. So all taxpayers, even here in New York are paying for four hundred million dollars of autism care services. In Minnesota, a program was supposed to be three million to stake hospice. The number

7:19 of hospices in California, just in Los Angeles, forget about all the californ just in Los Angeles is about two thousand.

7:24 Speaker 3 The entire country is six thousand.

7:27 Speaker 1 So you have that is mind bobbed.

7:29 Speaker 2 It’s is how many people are dying in LA. I mean, it’s impossible to have that many hospices. And here’s the part that drives you, baddy. No one dies in these hospices. There’s hospices, and for people at the end of life, no one’s dying because they’re lying. They’re signing up people falsely.

7:44 They trick people into signing up. They charge a lot of money to the federal government, taxpayers in New York and around the country, and you know, red states and bluestates, doesn’t matter. All the taxpayers are funneling money to Los Angeles.

7:56 So because they’re not taking hospice fraud or home health care frauds, we go in South Florida. We have twice as many durable medical equipment suppliers people sell your wheelchairs and gains twice as many as McDonald’s. I mean, come on, is that really possible. Why would you not want to go after this if you truly care about the sanctity

8:16 of these programs. And again, the Presidence leads are focused on affordability. We’ve done a lot of other things for affordability. We have drug pricing negotiations where we no longer are paying three times more than any other country for the same drugs. We’ve done things on transparency, We’re getting serious with insurance companies, all these things that are heavy lifts.

8:33 But the fraud, it just drives you wacky because that’s the kind of a problem that all of us should be equally focused on and this should not be a partisan problem, but has not become one. And Democrats hide behind the accusations that we’re not doing this because we care about the sanctity of the programs. But that is

8:49 the only reason we’re going after these problems.

8:52 Speaker 1 Now, it shouldn’t it be solving the fraud situation. Shouldn’t that be bipartiesant or is it not? I mean, what’s happening.

9:03 Speaker 2 Well, we believe political patronage is part of the problem. If you’re a governor and not offending an important constituents or getting those constituents to be more supportive of you, maybe potentially getting a union and public union involved and letting them feel better about how things are going, or a private union as well. These are all accusations that

9:24 are out there. I can’t attest to those, but there do seem to be reasons why governors are looking the other way. Certainly, in Minnesota there was a lot of accusations. They’re still remained that the accusations that that whistleblowers were driven out of the Department of Health.

9:41 Speaker 1 I’ve heard.

9:42 Speaker 2 I’ve heard in California the governor has ignored continuous calls for action from his own auditors to deal with these problems. And yet whether it’s the Russian mafia or other groups, they seem to have been able to get him to look the other way. And here in New York State, there’s without question a tremendous amount of pressure or whole

10:00 goal to not in any way interfere with the mini moneyed interest to profit when you’re spending a lot more money than any other state, you know, per beneficiary.

10:10 Speaker 1 I’m Medicaid doctor Meminas. I mean the other thing. The number that always sticks out for me is New York State. New York City the budget is two sixty plus one twenty seven. It’s four hundred billion dollars for twenty well for nineteen million people nineteen point eight. And Florida the whole state is only one hundred and nineteen billion, which

10:40 is almost quite truple in New York for twenty four million people in Florida. It’s just there are certain numbers that just stick out and tell you something is wrong.

10:52 Speaker 2 But someone’s got a point to it. And I guess our heart surgeon, I live on numbers. If I look at the heartbeat, I look at the blood pressure, I look the saturation of ox all numbers. The numbers are not adding up in New York State. You just give a very very good example. But I can give you

11:07 and regale the audience with dozens of numbers, all of which point to the same reality. There is a rot in the system. The fraud that we see in New York State is it’s not a flaw, it’s a feature.

11:19 For some people. They don’t mind the fraud, or they would have doubled it. I mean, John, listen, We’ve been around long enough. When really smart people don’t fix the problem, it’s because they don’t want to fix the problem. It’s not an accident. And that’s what we’re witnessing. So letters, that’s what you’re called. That if they take care of

11:35 the elderly, if they take care of certain groups, take care that there’s more contributions and the political aspect comes into play. It’s not that the seniors want it. It’s the folks providing the services that we believe are profiting wrongly and they’re empowering.

11:52 Speaker 3 Bad apples to take action.

11:54 Speaker 2 And this is this is why enough of us have to put our hands up and be counted. If you are a brave American who loves our country. You should be curious about how New York States could be so far off from other countries states, and how they’re spending money, and then get serious about what would motivate this, Because

12:13 across the board, whether it’s taking care of allegedly taking care of people in their homes with personal care services, or home health care, or slew of other softer services, services that your family would normally provide for you, where it’s harder for the government to audit whether it’s really done, those are the places where we’re seeing massive explosion in fraud.

12:33 And again these aren’t just Americans, these are foreign citizens doing this. Foreign governments are probably involved. When we do these big bus the perpetrators flee back to Russia or other countries.

12:44 Speaker 1 Doctor mem Andaz, thank you for everything you do for America. Please thank Secretary Kennedy what he does. And also please thank President Trump when you see him, because without President Trump, without Secretary Kennedy, without doctor Osiah self, you know America is going to be a better place because of that.

13:04 Speaker 3 Thank you so much, God bless you John. Thanks for all your deal