Medicaid Fraud Crackdown

The Trump administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has acknowledged a “significant error” in data used to justify a federal fraud probe of New York’s Medicaid program after falsely claiming roughly 5 million people received personal care services last year when the actual figure is about 450,000 — an error CMS says stemmed from misidentifying New York’s use of a billing code and that it has since refined its methodology. New York officials and outside experts called the original claim patently false or “slapdash,” saying the mistake could have been resolved easily, while CMS says the probe remains ongoing and continues to flag New York’s higher per‑beneficiary spending and large personal‑care workforce.

The Trump administration has acknowledged that CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz badly overstated alleged fraud in New York’s Medicaid personal care program, admitting to the Associated Press that a key figure used to justify a federal probe was wrong by a factor of about 11. Oz had publicly claimed in a social media video that roughly 5 million New Yorkers on Medicaid received personal care services like bathing and meal preparation last year, an "unheard of" level he cited in demanding the state "come clean," but CMS now concedes the actual number is about 450,000 out of 6.8 million enrollees. The mistake, rooted in a misreading of New York’s billing code structure, is one of several mischaracterizations the administration made about the state’s program and is fueling questions from health policy analysts about how carefully data is being vetted in Trump’s broader 'war on fraud' that explicitly targets Democratic-led states. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office called the initial allegation "patently false" and welcomed CMS’s correction, while critics online are seizing on the episode as evidence that the administration is attacking first and checking the facts later in a politically charged crackdown on blue-state social spending.