Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said fraudsters in Minnesota bribed mothers roughly $1,500 per child to falsely claim their children were autistic, saddling the children with diagnoses they did not have.
Oz made the remarks at an appearance alongside President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, crediting the administration’s anti-fraud task force and independent reporting for exposing the scheme.
The CMS administrator framed the abuse as a theft of more than money.
“Fraud doesn’t just steal our money. Fraud steals people’s lives and it also steals our trust as a nation, and that is devastating to any country,” Oz said.
He said the scheme carried two victims. A child wrongly labeled autistic carries that record going forward, Oz said, while mothers of children who actually need the services are left unable to afford care.
Oz said that after reviewing the reporting, CMS examined providers operating in Minnesota’s 14 programs flagged as high-risk for fraud and found roughly a third could not be validated.
“One in three shouldn’t have been doing that job,” Oz said. The agency is pursuing dozens of cases, including criminal investigations, and has deferred about half a billion dollars in payments to the state, he added.
The administrator credited independent journalist Nick Shirley, whose video of Minneapolis daycare and autism centers that appeared vacant drew federal attention. Shirley told CNN he uncovered around $100 million in fraud in a single day.
Minnesota’s autism program grew from about $3 million in 2018 to nearly $400 million in recent years, according to figures Oz has cited publicly. Prosecutor Joe Thompson has said the state’s 14 high-risk programs cost $18 billion since 2018 and that more than half of that amount may be fraudulent.
Trump appointed Vance to lead a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which held its first meeting at the White House earlier this year and drew in Cabinet secretaries along with Justice Department and Treasury officials. Oz in December gave Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) a 60-day ultimatum to restore the program’s integrity or lose funding.
Walz has called the federal effort a “campaign of retribution,” accusing the administration of “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/10/20/dr-oz-minnesota-autism-fraud-bribed-moms-fake-diagnoses/
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