Gov. Gavin Newsom of California filed a formal civil rights complaint Thursday against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, charging that he had illegally discriminated against Armenian Americans in Southern California with a recent video in which he appeared to tie the community to health care fraud.

In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom charged that Oz, a former TV talk show host, “spewed baseless and racially charged allegations” as he stood outside a popular bakery in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles and charged that about $3.5 billion worth of fraud had taken place in hospice and home care in the area.

In the video, which was posted on official government social media accounts Tuesday, the camera pans to nearby businesses with signs in Armenian script advertising credit repair and flatbread. Oz, whose own parents emigrated to the United States from Turkey, asserts that the fraud being committed “is run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.”

“You notice the lettering and language behind me is of that dialect,” he says in the video.

He adds that the four-block area he is touring in Van Nuys has 42 hospices and that Los Angeles has become “one of the epicenters for fraud, waste and abuse.”

The video is part of a Trump administration initiative that has alleged fraud in social services in Democratic-led states such as Minnesota, New York, Illinois and California.

Video Generated Backlash in LA

In the Armenian American community of Los Angeles, the video has generated intense local backlash. Owners of the businesses shown in the backdrop have denied having involvement in fraud of any kind.

Hospice fraud investigations and prosecutions have been ongoing for at least five years in California, particularly since an investigation in 2020 by the Los Angeles Times documented abuses by providers who had fraudulently billed Medicare for hospice care for patients who were not dying. Late last year, the Trump administration began emphasizing the problem in states run by perceived political opponents of the president.

On Wednesday, Newsom’s office had announced that it would review complaints about the video, “given the historic sensitivities” between Armenia and Turkey.

Oz replied on social platform X that his agency “will keep doing the actual work: going after fraudsters, period.”

“If there were a real defense for California’s fraud crisis, we’d hear it,” he said in his post.

In the letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom’s office said that “racially charged and false public statements by anyone involved in administering these critical federal health care programs seriously risks chilling participation in those programs by individuals targeted by the statements.”

Oz’s statements also reflected “discriminatory animus,” Newsom contended, “and reveal a discriminatory motive in how investigations of alleged fraud are conducted.”

The letter said that Oz’s comments had already harmed the businesses featured and that the bakery in the footage had reported a 30% drop in sales after the video was released. The letter demanded a federal civil rights investigation and said that the complaint was being filed “on behalf of the Armenian community in California.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shawn Hubler/Karsten Moran
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