The office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a civil rights complaint Thursday against Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, seeking an investigation into what it described as his “baseless and racist allegations” against Armenian Americans in California.
The conflict stems from a video posted on social media Tuesday in which Oz visits Los Angeles’ Van Nuys neighborhood and states that one four-block region in it contains 42 hospices and is evidence that L.A. has become “one of the epicenters for fraud, waste and abuse.” In the video, Oz alleges that around $3.5 billion worth of fraud has happened in the area and states that “quite a bit of it” is run by the Russian Armenian mafia.
The video shows the storefronts of nearby businesses, including one neighborhood bakery. Furthering his Russian Armenian mafia claims, Oz, whose parents emigrated to the United States from Turkey, points to the signage behind him at one point and says that the “lettering and language behind me is of that dialect.” The bakery featured has already reported a 30% drop in sales since the video’s release.
Owners of the businesses shown in the video have denied involvement in the fraud suggested by Dr. Oz.
In a letter sent Thursday to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom’s office said that Oz had “spewed baseless and racially charged allegations” in the video, which was posted to his official CMS Administrator account on X. Prior to the letter’s release, Newsom’s office had already announced Wednesday it was reviewing reports that Oz had targeted Southern California’s Armenian American community and noted that, “given the historic sensitivities” between Armenia and Turkey, it was “taking these allegations seriously.”
The office’s Wednesday post prompted a response from Oz.
“If there were a real defense for California’s fraud crisis, we’d hear it,” the CMS administrator wrote. “CMS and law enforcement will keep doing the actual work: going after fraudsters, period.” So far, neither Oz nor the CMS has publicly responded to Newsom’s civil rights complaint.
In his Thursday letter, Newsom said Dr. Oz’s language in the Van Nuys video reflected a “discriminatory animus, and reveal a discriminatory motive that could infect how investigations of alleged fraud are conducted.” Newsom’s office stated in the letter that the civil rights complaint was being filed “on behalf of the Armenian community in California.”
Dr. Oz’s video is part of a larger effort on the part of the Trump administration to investigate and shine a light on alleged fraud in social service programs in states like California and Minnesota. Newsom argued in a separate social media post that hospice fraud has already been a focus of his office for several years.
“In 2021, I signed a law banning all new hospice licenses to curb fraud, revoking 280+ licenses since,” Newsom wrote on X, before asking Dr. Oz directly, “Where have you been?”