Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a civil rights complaint against Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), after he accused Armenian crime groups of being responsible for health care fraud in Los Angeles.
“My office is filing a civil rights complaint seeking an investigation into Dr. Oz’s baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California,” Newsom said.
In a letter addressed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Newsom’s office alleged that Oz “spewed baseless and racially charged allegations targeting the Armenian community in Los Angeles” in a video he posted on Jan. 27. The complaint stated that “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.”
In the video, Oz can be seen touring the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, an area with a significant Armenian population. The Trump Administration official claimed that the high frequency of hospices in the area was potential evidence of “fraudulent activity” which is being investigated.
“There’s roughly $3.5 billion of fraud taking place here in Los Angeles in hospice and home care. It’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia,” claimed Oz, standing outside a building he identified as a hospice. “You notice the lettering and the language behind me is of that dialect. It highlights the fact that this is an organized crime mafia deal.”
Oz’s allegations came as part of his wider claim that California “has become one of the epicenters for fraud, waste, and abuse in America.” Oz previously alleged a seven-fold increase in hospice in L.A. County, claiming that “these fraudsters do tend to be foreign influences… these are Russian Armenian gangs, mafia.”
One of the businesses shown in Oz’s video was an Armenian bakery….
