Seniors in New York City are being paid between $1,000 and $1,200 a month to show up at adult day care centers in Queens. Not to receive care. Not to participate in programs. Just to walk through the door so the facility can bill Medicaid for services that were never provided.
The guy catching them is Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in President Donald Trump's administration.
Dr. Oz personally visited one of these Queens facilities and described what he found. "The whole experience was suspicious," Oz told Fox News Digital. "We know from the billing here that there's no way this business is running in the way that they claim."
The scam works like a vending machine. Adult day care operators recruit seniors with cash payments, mark them as attendees, then submit reimbursement claims to Medicaid for therapy, medical monitoring, and social services that never happened. The federal government spends $1 billion annually on social adult day care programs. New York's Medicaid system alone runs $124 billion, with annual costs hitting $90 billion — and the state spends $12,528 per beneficiary, which is 36% higher than the national average. That's 6.8 million people, roughly 34% of New York's entire population, covered under the program.
That's a lot of money flowing through a system where, as Dr. Oz put it, operators are "offering seniors money to attend facilities and then billing the government for services that were not actually provided."
Dr. Oz first announced the investigation into New York Medicaid fraud back in March. The adult day care crackdown is the latest result of that probe, and it fits a pattern the Trump administration has been building since day one: find the fraud, name the fraud, stop the fraud. The media spent two years mocking Oz as a television personality playing government. He responded by walking into a day care center in Queens and pulling the receipts.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul presides over this system. The state has the most expensive Medicaid program in the country, and the adult day care industry has been flagged for abuse for years. None of this is new information to Albany. What's new is that someone is actually doing something about it.
The scale of Medicaid fraud nationally makes this one facility in Queens look like a rounding error. Dr. Oz himself has pointed to the estimated $1 billion in Medicaid fraud carried out in Minnesota, much of it tied to Somali immigrant communities billing for services in daycare and feeding programs that didn't exist. Same playbook, different state. The mechanism is identical: sign people up, bill the government, pocket the difference. The only variable is how long it takes someone to notice.
This is what the DOGE-era reform agenda looks like when it moves past the white papers and into the field. Not a press conference. Not a policy proposal. A CMS administrator walking into a building in Queens and saying the numbers don't add up.
The federal government spends $1 billion a year on adult day care programs. One facility visit turned up fraud. According to the Center Square, which first reported Oz's findings, the investigation is ongoing and enforcement actions are underway.
A billion dollars a year. One guy walked in and checked.