The Trump administration acknowledged this week that it used the wrong figures to help justify a fraud probe into New York’s Medicaid program, after Mehmet Oz said last month that the state had given personal care services to some 5 million people. The real number was about 450,000.
Oz made the inaccurate claim in a social media video and in a letter to New York’s Democratic governor, saying that level of use was unheard of and urging the state to come clean about its Medicaid program. On Wednesday, the mismatch landed as more than a bookkeeping error: it was one of at least a few misrepresentations in the administration’s description of the program, and it undercut a case aimed at one of the country’s largest safety-net systems.
The difference is stark. New York has 6.8 million Medicaid enrollees, and the 450,000 people who used those services last year amounted to about 6% to 7% of the total. Oz’s 5 million figure implied a program touched nearly everyone in the state system, a claim the administration now says was mistaken.
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The administration’s fraud campaign has focused mostly on Democratic-led states, and the New York dispute shows how quickly that drive has run into a basic test of numbers. Michael Kinnucan, who has followed the issue, said the figures could have been cleared up in a phone call, calling the approach “really slapdash.”
The episode also reflects a broader criticism of Trump’s second administration: that it tends to attack first and confirm the facts later. Here, the administration used an inflated count to support a fraud investigation, then had to walk back the math once the error became impossible to ignore. That leaves the New York probe on weaker ground, and it puts the burden back on federal officials to show there is a case beyond rhetoric.
