Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz highlighted a Brooklyn Medicaid fraud conviction and questioned Florida’s subsidized health insurance enrollment Saturday as he promoted the Trump administration’s efforts to stop improper federal payments.
Appearing on Fox News’ “Saturday in America,” Oz discussed a scheme involving adult daycare businesses and alleged irregularities in Affordable Care Act coverage, Trending Politics reported.
The Brooklyn case involved Zakia Khan, 55, whose businesses submitted $64 million in Medicaid claims between October 2017 and July 2024. Prosecutors said Medicaid paid about $56 million.
U.S. District Judge Natasha Merle sentenced Khan to 76 months in prison this week. She was also ordered to pay more than $56 million in restitution and forfeit $5 million in proceeds.
The forfeited assets included two properties, cash and gold jewelry seized from her home, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York’s announcement.
Khan owned Happy Family and Family Social, two social adult daycare centers, along with a home care company. Prosecutors said she paid recipients kickbacks to facilitate billing for services that were not provided.
She pleaded guilty in August 2025 to conspiracies involving health care fraud and defrauding the U.S. government through illegal kickbacks.
Undercover video showed Khan counting cash for an officer posing as a Medicaid recipient, according to the reporting.
Oz cited the prosecution as an example of money being diverted from programs intended to support vulnerable patients. His broader comments also addressed preventing payments before suspected fraudsters receive them.
Earlier this month, Oz said CMS had stopped approximately $42 billion “just by not shipping the money out of the building,” Townhall reported.
He also estimated that Medicare and Medicaid were experiencing approximately $100 billion in annual theft. Those figures reflect Oz’s broader claims, separate from the losses established in Khan’s criminal case.
“If we could just take the fraud out of Medicare, we would double the life expectancy of the Medicare trust fund,” Oz said.
Turning to Florida, Oz said enrollment in what he called Obamacare’s “free category” was five times larger than the population eligible for that subsidy tier.
In a social media statement, he cited an analysis estimating that enrollment in the highest subsidy category exceeded the eligible population in nearly every Florida county, reaching more than 11 times the estimate in some areas.
“And ACA enrollment fraud isn’t isolated to just FL. It’s a nationwide problem, and CMS is putting a stop to it,” Oz wrote.
The enrollment comparisons are estimates cited by Oz, rather than findings from individual criminal prosecutions. The report did not provide the analysis’s methodology.
CMS has identified concerns involving applications without Social Security numbers, unauthorized broker enrollments and coverage obtained without consumers’ requests. Its response includes enrollment reviews, data analysis, payment suspensions and provider revocations.
Separately, the administration announced $500 Obamacare refunds for nearly 1 million customers who paid premiums without assistance. Those payments, scheduled to begin in October, concern marketplace user fees and are distinct from the fraud enforcement efforts.
