Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s point man for Medicare and Medicaid, says the billions of entitlement fraud being uncovered in Democrat states may be intentionally driven by politics rather than incompetence.

“I do think it's a feature for some of these states,” Oz told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night in which he detailed why the administration led by Vice President JD Vance temporarily pulled $1.3 billion in Medicaid funding from California and uncovered foreign fraudsters stealing taxpayer welfare monies.

“Republicans always suspected there was fraud of this magnitude. Democrats feel embarrassed that it's gotten this bad, and they don't know what happened to all the money they thought they were helping people with. So it's a great issue for us to drive home,” he said.

Oz said his own agency, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), alone is losing $100 billion a year to fraud, a total that if stopped could extend the life of America’s most famous entitlement program.

“If we just fix that, just give you an affordability context, it will double the life expectancy of the Medicare trust fund,” he said. “So if you're out there working your tail off, hoping one day Medicare will be there for you to catch you in your older years, it’ll double the life expectancy of that program.”

Oz announced this week his agency shut down 800 hospice centers suspected of being empty, fraudulent shells.

“It highlights the reality that the fraud had actually created such a deep corruption, such a deep rot in the system, that when someone finally began to take action, they all scurried like rats into the corners. They never thought anybody would come after them,” he said.

Oz offered an example from New York state on how politics appears to have perpetrated systematic waste.

“The No. 1 job in the entire state is a personal care service attendant. What does that mean? These are services that your family would do for you. Normally, I carry the groceries upstairs, cook, take you to the doctor's office appointment, that kind of stuff. In New York State, we now pay people to do that for you,” he explained.

“The person we're paying can be your son, or the neighbor's son. Your son could be helping them. You get the story. These are unlicensed people in undocumented, unsupervised settings, providing services that we're paying for,” he added. “Five hundred thousand people are doing these jobs now. Number one jobs program in the state.

“And this is the catch: when the governor of New York is seeing declining employment, and they can get people employed by the federal government and the disguise of personal care services, it's a winner. They don't have to pay unemployment. They get to take taxes on the money that these guys are getting paid,” he explained.

And, he noted, one of the Democrat Party’s key contingencies is now benefiting from the explosive growth of the program: Big Labor.

“The unions got permission to unionize these people. Everybody's getting money through Medicaid,” he said.

Oz said the recent hospice fraud crackdown exposed another villain in the fleecing of American taxpayers: foreigners.

"Think about how much money that is going to, in this case, organized criminal endeavors, the Russian mafia,” he said. “Much of it goes overseas. I mean, we caught one of these guys. Just sentenced them. … These guys had stolen $58 million from taxpayers. They bought gold bullion. They know how to invest, put it in their suitcases, and they were fleeing back to their native country when we caught them.”