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DR. OZ: ONE SHORT VIDEO, NUMERIOUS DECEPTIONS
From a Jonathan Cohn post of yesterday (thebulwark.com/p/donald… behind a bulwark Substack paywall note)
I caught a Youtube video referenced of Dr. Oz speaking about ACA fraud on Fox, apparently from a stand at the “Great American State Fair” (accompanied by apparent shills).
This ACA fraud stuff is a big item of a manipulative propaganda action, to try and disguise the effects of the lapsed ACA expanded subsidies 1/1/26, which was done at the insistence of the administration and Republicans, and where it now appears 3 to 5 million people, of about 22 million covered in 2025, have already lost, or will soon be losing, health coverage.
(A reference on that, and the propaganda cover up is the Cohn post linked to above, as well as my own pair of posts:
and
However, the subject of this note is a single video, only 8 minutes in length, where I count quite a few deceptions to keep certain information hidden, emanating from Dr. Oz.
(Especially remarkable, because roughly the last 3 minutes of the video are devoted to discussion of pancakes available and Dr. Oz and the Fox shills eating them at the “Great American State Fair”, which is a clear technique—perhaps from Edward Bernays—I don’t really know—to suggest something friendly and family-like is going on here, instead of a devious and pernicious con job on those with low or totally-absent critical thinking skills, who in addition know nothing of the policy details.
Just as syrup and a few dollops of butter softens up further an already-soft stack of pancakes, so to does the pancake-festival setup soften further the brains of the Fox News viewers.
Anyway, it is impressive that the deceptions have all been squeezed into just five minutes when the pancake-softening part is extracted!)
The specific deceptions I have pointed the Youtube video to in each case, and have explained the issue above or below each.
that (to the effect of) "You only get Obamacare if your income is between 100% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level is not correct, even now.
It is correct that NOW you only get SUBSIDIZED Obamacare in that circumstance.
However, the real issue is how craftily he has left out that for five years, from 2021 to 2025, before the Republicans and POTUS made the expanded subsidies lapse, you could get SUBSIDIZED Obamacare even if your income was above 400% of the Federal Poverty Level, and by George, certain of those people over 400% of the Federal Poverty Level sure as hell needed the subsidy.
Like this couple:
Laramie County, Wyoming. Zip 82001. Married couple. Both 62 years old. Non smokers both.
Total income $88,000 a year. U.S. citizens both.
If expanded subsidies were extended
An option: BlueSelect Gold Standard without Kid’s Dental ($4000 deductible, $16,400 out-of-pocket max)
Premium after subsidy: 4748.64/yr =5% of income
Now, without the extension:
Lowest-cost plan: BlueSelect Bronze (skimpy truly catastrophic-only—deductible and out-of-pocket max both: $21,200/year (=24% of income)
Premium (no subsidy available) : $39,904.80/yr (=45% of income))
So, you can see, now, if the couple gets sick enough, there goes 69% of pre-tax income!
Not only the couple in Wyoming.
Though Wyoming is a bit higher than average in premium, in virtually all states, older people just a bit over the 400% of Federal Poverty Level returned "subsidy cliff" have big problems of typically premiums of at least $25,000 a year in the same case.
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Here we have Dr. Oz claiming that (equivalently--I am not putting exact words but am putting exact meaning) "the Democrats are saying that all of the people leaving Obamacare after the lapse of the expanded subsidies are leaving only because of the loss of the expanded subsidies and not reduction of fraud."
Well, I've read what Jonathan Cohn (a Democrat, I’m quite sure) has said in this post: thebulwark.com/p/donald… and the prior “phantom” one: thebulwark.com/p/obamac… Behind that bulwark paywall, both, note.)
Jonathan Cohn, that Democrat is, saying quite precisely that a good number have left due to being fraud cases and detected at that. But many of those who have left who have been forced out of coverage are non-fraudsters, and some of them of those non-fraudsters are now in quite the pickle.
(Which, incidentally, is also the conclusion you find in my careful look, here: normspier828307.substac… )
3 ) Noting that the case for widespread ACA fraud is heavily based on a notion of “phantoms”—people with ACA coverage who wind up never filing a claim (because, perhaps, they are very young and never happen to get sick, and, being young, never even get check ups—I myself was in that boat for about 20 years. No longer!)
"How often do you use health-insurance?", Dr. Oz asks the 70-year-old guy with white hair.
(Can you say "scripted infomercial", children? Can you say “How come they left off the periodic shots of the audience, nodding and clapping?”—which technique I think might be from Leni Riefenstahl.)
4) Dr. Oz boasts of all the ACA fraud he stopped youtube.com/watch?v=w9L… ,
and here he talks about stopping the case of duplicate-coverage fraud being here people with other health coverage as well as an ACA plan.
Affordable employer coverage disqualifies one from subsidized ACA coverage, and cases of this have not been indicated in the 2/26/26 CMS report on all of the fraud (and the enrollment drops). (You can find that report from my later-in-time post, or Jonathan Cohn’s later-in-time post, if you want to scrutinize it.)
The CMS report does indicate a dropping of something like 500,000 people from ACA coverage who had both ACA on-exchange and coverage in another federal health-coverage program, that is, Medicaid or CHIP.
The thing about those weed-outs to note is that, though often a broker does pocket $240 to $360 a year by getting a person to enroll in a duplication-of-CHIP-or-Medicaid plan, it's not that much money saved.
It is analogous to married couples having two health plans, one from each of their employers, which is common.
The amount of money saved by the weed-outs is not like the $15,000 a year average health costs of a person in the country. It might be like $1000.
(If the physicians or other providers double billed for the services performed, then it could be $15,000 a year saved. But that's not what they are talking about.)
(I don’t know if you want to fault Dr. Oz for not mentioning it here. But the other “fraud reduction” cases that seem real in the CMS report is about 900,000, which seems to be mainly people below 100% of the Federal Poverty Level in the 9 Republican-run states that have not expanded Medicaid, who, unless they become dirt-poor in BOTH income and assets to qualify for traditional pre-ACA Medicaid, have no option to have any affordable health coverage at all. The 900,000 are among an estimated 2.7 million people in this non-Medicaid-expansion “coverage gap”. (Nice job, Dr. Oz!))
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So, in the 5 minutes of video not about pancakes, above are four deceptions from Dr. Oz.
The video has a bit more to offer, not a deception, but a clarification of deceptive terminology to be used henceforth. (At least I think so.)
5) Here
we see that Dr. Oz uses the term "ghosts", not "phantoms", for the people who never filed a claim on their Obamacare.
People less attuned to the issue than myself may not be aware that an apparent problem arose, not anticipated in with the apparently-clumsy introduction of the propaganda term “phantom” emanating from a one “Paragon Health Institute” (see: normspier828307.substac… ) a year or so ago.
The problem seems to be that the meaning of the word “phantom” was not universally understood by a certain person’s base.
Gradually, this was realized, possibly first in Kansas, where the term was switched to “ghost”. (Propaganda-system blip! Whoops! Minor, though.)
So, obviously, in a nationally-directed broadcast, we see Dr. Oz has gone with “ghosts”, which will now be the standard, apparently.
(Other ways of expressing the propaganda are likely to arise. I have tried to address that in this note:
“There is a time to be born,
A time to die,
A time to embrace,
A time to refrain from embracing
And toss away pancakes
And tell Dr. Oz you don’t want pancakes
But you do want health insurance
Especially (but not limited to) if you had it in 2025, and it has been taken away in 2026,
Or will be taken away in 2027 by the OBBB cuts”
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Wait! I’m not done with Dr. Oz.
6) If you prefer something in the more D.W. Griffith - Trumpian vain, try this:
(Regrettably, I had to take us to a different Fox News video, involving, in this case, no pancakes at all.)
7) If you want something technically obscure and difficult (so much so that it took Charles Gaba to find it initially) it is within here:
where you will be rewarded, if you do choose to put in the effort, for the realization that Dr. Oz is saying basically the EXACT OPPOSITE of what is true.
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Want more deceptions? See this: substack.com/profile/58…