Epoch Times - Dr. Mehmet Oz Breaks Down ‘Stunning’ Healthcare Fraud in California
Aired: 2026-01-17
Duration: 04:14


=== Doctors Misleading Patients (04:14) ===

[00:00:00]  What's happened in California is a tolerance and acceptance of fraud.
[00:00:06]  They realized that they could pay doctors to move people into hospice.
[00:00:11]  The hospice is designed for the last six months of your life.
[00:00:13]  It means you're going to die.
[00:00:14]  These hospice programs are created when the most common reason that you'd enter it is cancer.
[00:00:20]  But these days, not everyone with cancer dies, but also you're putting a lot of people with Alzheimer's and other conditions in there.
[00:00:26]  So it became a little harder to police whether people are going into hospice.
[00:00:30]  But what happens if 100% of the people in hospice survive six months?
[00:00:35]  Like, nobody dies.
[00:00:36]  And that happens.
[00:00:37]  Doesn't sound like hospice.
[00:00:38]  Doesn't sound like hospice.
[00:00:40]  Doctors are being paid to send people inappropriately to hospice.
[00:00:44]  Now, that's a problem because if you're put into hospice, you actually give up the rest of your health care protection.
[00:00:52]  You no longer get traditional Medicare benefits because you're in hospice, you're dying.
[00:00:56]  So we're not going to pay all these extra expenses for things that aren't going to benefit you because you've decided to pull back.
[00:01:01]  Voluntarily, you've decided that you're not going to go out there and try to get everything done for you possible to help you live longer.
[00:01:08]  You've made peace with the end.
[00:01:10]  But people are put on hospice who don't know it.
[00:01:12]  They don't realize it.
[00:01:14]  And so now they don't have access to regular Medicare anymore.
[00:01:16]  So people are dying because they can't get care because they were falsely tricked into being on hospice.
[00:01:23]  Now, that's a major concern for me.
[00:01:25]  But then I began to look into how this could possibly happen.
[00:01:28]  How is it that we've gotten seven times more hospice in California over the last several years?
[00:01:33]  Do we have seven times more people dying?
[00:01:36]  Like, what's going on here?
[00:01:37]  And you begin to realize it's systemic fraud.
[00:01:40]  Everyone decided not to do anything about this.
[00:01:42]  We're not going to look at it.
[00:01:43]  It's too painful, too difficult.
[00:01:45]  Maybe some groups may benefit financially from not checking into this.
[00:01:49]  The doctors are getting engaged so much in the hospice that it's beginning to undermine the basic ethos of the healthcare profession.
[00:01:57]  I'll tell you one whistleblower story that will chill you, and then we should move on to the good news in healthcare because there's plenty of it.
[00:02:04]  I was talking to a gentleman who owns five hospice centers.
[00:02:07]  Now, if you own five hospices, you have to ask yourself why.
[00:02:10]  You own five hospices because you're hiding the ball.
[00:02:13]  You want to have a lot of patients split over a lot of different centers so that we can't track you as well.
[00:02:20]  Anyways, he's building this beautiful mansion, massive house, because he's got a lot of money, right?
[00:02:25]  Because he's stealing money from these hospice programs.
[00:02:29]  The plumber comes in and says, you know, I see you're in the hospice business.
[00:02:33]  I've got a little side hustle.
[00:02:34]  I own a hospice business.
[00:02:36]  And the guy who's the doctor says, really?
[00:02:39]  Because, yeah, I'm a plumber, but I got a hospice business.
[00:02:41]  You don't have to really be a doctor to own hospice.
[00:02:44]  And then the carpenter who's next to him is building the cabinet says, hey, what do you know?
[00:02:48]  I got a hospice business too.
[00:02:50]  So both of the folks who are doing plumbing and carpentering have side hustle businesses, the contractors in hospice.
[00:02:59]  The guy building the house makes a lot of money.
[00:03:01]  And so that guy, I started asking, well, how'd you make all this money?
[00:03:04]  He goes, well, you know, I go to doctors.
[00:03:06]  I mean, low-life doctors?
[00:03:07]  No, I go like to the doctors at Cedar Sinai.
[00:03:10]  Now, this is an allegation.
[00:03:10]  I can't prove this.
[00:03:12]  But I don't know why he'd lie to me.
[00:03:14]  You know, I'm trying to learn and he's willing to offer some insights.
[00:03:17]  He says, the doctors at this hospital are willing to send me some patients.
[00:03:23]  And I said, that's weird, really.
[00:03:26]  They just pay them and they give me, yeah, because the doctor said if I gave him a thousand bucks a month or something, that he'd send me patients.
[00:03:32]  And then I started to do that in other hospitals.
[00:03:35]  And then I'd ask the doctors to send me the patients from the hospital directly.
[00:03:38]  And they say, oh, no, no, no.
[00:03:39]  We can't send you the patients from our hospitals directly because our board members own hospice.
[00:03:45]  And the board members of the hospital want that hospital to send patients to their hospice.
[00:03:50]  You understand the level of perversion here?
[00:03:53]  We've got low-life who shouldn't be in the business, right?
[00:03:56]  And not every doctor finished top of our class, right?
[00:03:59]  A lot of doctors have lost their way.
[00:04:02]  They're getting paid.
[00:04:03]  They're paying other doctors.
[00:04:06]  Accusations are that people with money who are involved in hospitals are also being paid in these unscrupulous endeavors.