The Trump administration has acknowledged that it made a major mistake in the numbers it used to justify a fraud investigation led by Dr. Mehmet Oz into New York's Medicaid program, a reversal that is raising new questions about the reliability of its broader anti-fraud push in several states.
At the center of the dispute is a claim made last month by Dr. Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), who said New York's Medicaid program had provided personal care services to roughly 5 million people in the previous year. That figure would have represented an astonishing share of the state's 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees and helped fuel the administration's accusation that New York's system demanded closer federal scrutiny.
According to an exclusive Associated Press report, CMS has admitted that the actual number was closer to 450,000, a fraction of what Oz had publicly claimed. Agency spokesperson Chris Krepich said federal officials had misread the way New York applies certain billing codes and have since adjusted their methodology.
In a statement to AP, he said CMS remains committed to making sure its reviews accurately reflect state-specific billing practices while continuing to examine New York's oversight of personal care services.
The correction is significant because the original figure was used as a public centerpiece of the administration's fraud probe. Health policy experts told AP the error was serious enough to undermine confidence in the federal government's handling of the case. Michael Kinnucan, a senior health policy adviser at the Fiscal Policy Institute, said the discrepancy should have been easy to resolve and described the administration's work as careless.
New York officials quickly seized on the admission. A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul told AP that the federal government's original accusation was plainly false and said the governor remains committed to rooting out waste, fraud and abuse while protecting the programs New Yorkers rely on. The state Health Department also pushed back, calling Oz's earlier portrayal of the Medicaid system an attempt to blur the facts.
Even with the corrected figure, the probe itself is still moving forward. CMS told AP that it continues to have concerns about New York's Medicaid program, including the state's high spending on personal care, the large number of personal care aides it employs, and its above-average costs per resident and per beneficiary. Analysts interviewed by AP said those numbers can also reflect New York's higher cost of living and its policy choice to provide extensive at-home care for vulnerable residents rather than forcing more people into institutional settings.
The New York case is part of a wider crackdown by the Trump administration, which has launched or expanded fraud-related actions in states including California, Florida, Maine and Minnesota. AP reported that President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order creating a federal anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance, and Minnesota has already sued after the administration paused hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding there over fraud concerns.
Oz's comments about New York drew criticism beyond the faulty enrollment figure. AP reported that advocates disputed other claims he made in a video about the state's personal care eligibility rules, arguing that he mischaracterized recent changes and oversimplified the reality faced by disabled New Yorkers who depend on these services. One Medicaid recipient in Nassau County told AP she was offended by Oz's suggestion that this is the kind of help families should simply provide on their own, saying that assumption ignores the realities many families face.
The administration's admission now leaves a larger political and policy problem in its wake. A campaign that was billed as a tough crackdown on fraud is suddenly facing questions about whether some of its most eye-catching claims were checked carefully enough before being rolled out in public. As AP's reporting makes clear, that error has already weakened one of the administration's highest-profile cases.
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