Dr. Oz uses AI to perform radical surgery to – Latest News
Dr. Mehmet Oz is fast changing into a taxpayer’s dream on the helm of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse” isn’t simply a drained slogan to him — it’s a mandate. And he’s imposing it.
He arrived with a popularity because the new sheriff on the town: Few physicians would need to tackle the duty of digging via a poisonous pile of fraud, the place scammers long loved siphoning billions from taxpayers.
His mandate was easy: Visit the nation’s worst hotspots — of which there’s no scarcity. California, of course, ranked on the high, having earned a popularity because the epicenter of healthcare fraud.
Mehmet Oz speaks, as Vice President JD Vance appears on, during a press convention to talk about “anti-fraud initiatives” within the Indian Treaty Room on the White House. REUTERS
The public temper mirrored that darkish actuality. Outrage was on full show throughout social media. One notably cynical joke captured it: Maybe the state’s tourism brochure must be up to date: “Come visit the burned-out homes, ghost hospice centers, and bureaucrats operating ‘auto-pen’ payments to fraudsters.”
Into that mess stepped Dr. Oz.
He took a web page from Elon Musk’s playbook, setting in movement the “DOGE-ing” of California with data-detection instruments.
Fraudsters, even essentially the most seasoned “criminal enterprises,” have been no match for AI systems that by no means sleep and by no means miss a detection line — processing hundreds of thousands of knowledge factors and cross-referencing tons of of hundreds of claims.
Dr. Oz didn’t have to look far to discover essentially the most egregious exercise. Taxpayers received an eyeful because the doctor and federal brokers zeroed in on one of essentially the most financially abusive — and remarkably amateurish targets: the hospice and homecare industry.
He encountered a labyrinth of felony clusters — however, to taxpayers’ satisfaction, systematically organized into pink flags by AI.
Mehmet Oz speaks on the fraud epidemic in Calif. at a press convention after a sequence of FBI raids have been carried out throughout the larger LA space. Carlin Stiehl for CA Post
Not one to stay in a cubicle, Dr. Oz and his federal brokers made a focused on-site go to, sparking statewide outrage on the sheer scale of fraud and brazen scheme perpetrated on taxpayers.
They stood exterior a dilapidated strip mall — as media cameras rolled — exposing an allegedly illicit operation: 42 so-called “hospices” allegedly clustered within a four-block radius. Yet taxpayers have been left, unwittingly, lining the pockets of scammers — yr after yr.
The “anomalies” ought to have been inconceivable to miss: Red flags waving in plain sight that even essentially the most detached paperwork ought to have caught — besides on Governor Gavin Newsom’s watch: Patients enrolled who weren’t terminally unwell, nonetheless listed yr after yr; identities tied to stolen personal knowledge; billing submitted for companies by no means rendered, usually tied to services that didn’t exist; and sudden, unexplained spikes in claims exercise.
Those billing scams left taxpayers gazing a financial crime scene, questioning how billions of their {dollars} vanished into what amounted to a cash-grab for scammers.
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Within simply 10 weeks of arriving, Dr. Oz shut off the federal money spigot to tons of of allegedly faux hospices. What investigators uncovered was staggering: 210 “active agencies” packed into a single sq. mile: An absurd focus that defied each medical actuality and common sense.
To taxpayers, it appeared like bureaucrats asleep on the administrative wheel, whereas everybody else paid for the incompetence.
Dr. Oz, reviewing the fraud path, reportedly reacted with disbelief after discovering that a number of dozen hospice corporations have been registered to the exact same building. “How could anyone ignore this type of brazen fraud?” he requested. That is — till now.
Intrepid reporter Nick Shirley additionally made a media splash, bringing his YouTube digital camera to doc “hospice clusters” in Los Angeles. Filming from a strip mall within the San Fernado Valley, he highlighted the obtrusive absence of sufferers — and, simply as strikingly, any medical infrastructure to deal with them.
But what actually drove social media commentary wasn’t what was lacking from the services — it was what was parked exterior: a Tesla Cybertruck sat in a single lot, and a BMW M8 was noticed rushing away from one other after the reporter’s arrival.
Those six-figure automobiles — stark symbols of lavish authorities spending — carefully mirrored the categories of anomalies Dr. Oz’s AI-detection systems are already flagging throughout Medicare and Medi-Cal.
As for the deeper human toll, Dr. Oz burdened: Healthcare “fraud isn’t just about stealing your tax dollars — in some cases, it’s about stealing your life.”
Robyn Dolgin is an opinion author and former information wire reporter.
