Dr. Oz Displays Chart Highlighting Medical Fraud: There Are Fraudsters Making a Million Dollars a Patient on This Stuff

EXCERPT:

OZ: “So let’s put this up here. Now, this is a fascinating bit of chart. This, back in 2019, is how much money we were spending on skin substitutes. Now, what are skin substitutes? Skin substitutes are little pieces of material the size of my nail that you paste on the people’s wounds. Unfortunately, fraudsters can pretend to do that, and sometimes they’ll actually paste more little pieces of, again, stamp-sized material on your skin than you have surface area of your skin. There are fraudsters making a million dollars a patient on this stuff. And when that happens, you take a program that used to be under $200 million, you take it up to $14.5 billion. That’s a lot of money. And that bankrupts not just hospital systems and physician groups, but it causes major problems across the entire landscape, but it also sends a message that we must not care about fraud, because if in 2021, '22, '23, '24, if you cared about fraud, you would have prevented this from happening. We thought this number was going to be over $25 billion this year, so we took action. And the number now we’re projecting is less than 1% of that.”