American Thought Leaders

Dr. Mehmet Oz: Up to $4 Billion in Health Care Fraud in California

“Minnesota … is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).Minnesota has become the epicenter of several overlapping fraud investigations of childcare programs, small business pandemic loans, and Medicaid services. Earlier this month, Dr. Oz traveled to Minnesota to tour suspected fraud sites and meet with whistleblowers and announced that over $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding might be withheld.“What we’re seeing in Minnesota, which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people and puts them at risk … is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care,” Dr. Oz says.“The magnitude of fraud there, we believe, is approximating $4 billion just in hospice and home health care,” he says.Dr. Oz oversees programs that together constitute about one-fourth of the entire U.S. federal budget.In this episode, he breaks down how the home health care and hospice systems are being exploited on a massive scale and also how Medicare beneficiary numbers are being stolen and weaponized for fraudulent billing schemes.As the administration approaches its one‑year mark, he reflects on efforts to cut waste, lower drug prices, and transform health in America.President Donald Trump has recently unveiled his new “Great Healthcare Plan” to lower prices and increase transparency.“For decades, Americans have been paying three times more than Europeans and other developed nations have been paying for the exact same drugs made in the same facilities,” Dr. Oz says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Evidence of Harm: What the Data Really Show About Pediatric Transgender Procedures | Leor Sapir

One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days.In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page review, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In November last year, an updated, peer-reviewed version was published with additional appendices and supplements.Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the report’s main outside co-authors. In our in-depth interview, Sapir provides a detailed overview of the review’s findings and conclusions.“We tried to be as factual and defensible as we possibly could,” he said.The goal of the report, he says, is to “engage with people in the medical profession who may not be aligned with the administration, but who do care about questions of medical evidence and medical ethics.”In this episode, he breaks down:- The prevalence of sex-changing procedures in the United States, as well as the reversal in approaches in various Scandinavian countries and in the UK.- How misleading and unscientific language was used by professionals across many fields to promote pediatric sex transitioning.- The role of the organization, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in establishing “gender-affirming care” as the accepted standard.- How clinicians, in his view, distorted the principle of patient autonomy to increase pediatric sex change surgeries.There is one chapter in the report that everyone should read, Sapir said. And that is the chapter about ethics.“The question on everybody’s mind is: Should we do it? That’s an ethical question. And medical ethics is, you would hope, [what] governs the field of medicine,” he told me.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Untold Story Behind Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech | Producer Mark Joseph

Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”“Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich.In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20 years to bring this film to the big screen, and what it was like to film during the height of COVID-era restrictions.Joseph, who’s also the founder of MJM Entertainment, is the author of “Making Reagan: A Memoir From the Producer of the Reagan Film.”The movie is based on Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”That book, Joseph said, helped him understand Reagan and his passionate drive to end what he called the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union.“There have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but Kengor was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said: ‘Can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child?’ And the current pastor said they’re in the basement, in the box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before.’ So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher,” Joseph said.The film received sharply divided reviews: On “Rotten Tomatoes,” 98 percent of the audience gives a positive rating, but only 18 percent of critics’ reviews are positive.That may be a new record.“We have the greatest gap between critics and film goers of any movie ever made in Hollywood history. ... I’m really proud of that. I don’t make movies for critics. I make movies for the film goers,” Joseph said.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Devin Nunes on Ending the Politicization of America’s Intelligence Agencies

It’s been almost a decade since then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes first launched his investigation with now-FBI director Kash Patel into the scandal that became known as “Russiagate.”His watershed memo back in 2018—dubbed the “Nunes memo”—detailed what he describes as grave abuses in how the FBI obtained surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to surveil Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and later the first Trump administration.It’s “the biggest scandal in U.S. history, by a long way,” he says.In July 2025, the Trump administration released new documents shedding more light on the Russia probe, revealing the creation of an intelligence community assessment (ICA) at President Barack Obama’s behest that alleged Russian President Vladimir Putin had interfered in the presidential election in order to help Trump.Nunes is currently serving as chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a body created in 1956 during the Eisenhower era to advise the president on U.S. intelligence activities and provide an external check on the intelligence community.In this episode, we sit down to reflect on the “Russiagate” saga, almost a decade later, and what accountability he’d like to see.We also dive into his work as CEO of Truth Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which owns Truth Social.TMTG recently announced an unexpected merger with the pioneering nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies. Why did they choose to make this move, and why is he convinced nuclear fusion technology will be critical to America’s future?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Exclusive: Inside SBA’s Crack Down on Loan Fraud Nationwide | Administrator Kelly Loeffler

The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million.“We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never access the services of the SBA again,” said SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler.They’ll now be taking the same model to investigate other states for COVID-era abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans.In this episode, I sat down with Loeffler to understand her work targeting fraud nationwide, bolstering domestic manufacturing, cutting regulations, and ending politically motivated debanking.Loeffler grew up on a family farm in Illinois, was the first in her family to graduate from college, and later became a successful businesswoman in finance and FinTech before becoming a U.S. senator and now head of the SBA.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.