Dr. Oz Uncovers $380 Million Fraud at Griggs Midway

The “Griggs Midway” building in St. Paul—a former linen factory—has been unmasked as the epicenter of a massive, systematic raid on taxpayer dollars.

Dr. Mehmet Oz is the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill joined him to officially put the Walz administration on notice. A “boots on the ground” fact-finding mission revealed a staggering scale of fraud.

Dr. Oz:

“Behind me is the Griggs Midway building. It looks like a factory because it was a factory, a linen factory. They made cloth back there. It’s converted into an office building. You’ll notice all those little signs there, and there’s tons of little businesses inside.

Roughly 400 Medicaid businesses were started in the building behind me over the last several years. They generated about $380 million of billing that you, the taxpayer, were putting up. That means roughly each business had a million dollars of billing. It’s an industrial area.

There’s no reason that you’d have a mother bring her child there. You can’t imagine getting extra business support. An autistic child probably wouldn’t want to come here. You hear the noise. It’s just not a hospitable place. The question is, how is it possible 400 businesses billing almost $400 million were able to thrive here?

What did the owner of the business, this building, think was happening inside? Why did no one in the state figure out this was a concern?

Perplexingly to me, in a place of this nature, an industrial complex, that people would not come to for child care or autism care or transportation support, how is it possible this could come up like an abscess in the heart of Minneapolis and nobody was watching?

I think it’s because they weren’t looking. They didn’t want to know that this problem was happening here. And it’s very concerning to me that only now, when there’s more federal supervision, are people beginning to ask the tough questions.

So you’ll notice there’s already a watch group that’s observing us. There are people in cars taking pictures of us. They’re calling around trying to figure out what’s going down. And they don’t have to wonder, we’re telling you.

We’re here to figure out why these folks are being defrauded, why the people who live in Minnesota aren’t getting access to the care they deserve because it’s been stolen. But the fact that you’ve got people behind me in cars concerned that we’re even talking about this story should be something that worries you. It bothers me.

There’s been a censoring of truth, an inability just to own what’s happening in their state. That’s concerning to me. They talk about being nice in Minnesota. I want to be nice too, but a person who’s a good person doesn’t have to always be nice. They’ve got to be truthful and be honest.

And sometimes, you’ve got to tell people stories they don’t want to hear. That’s what doctors do, and that’s what we’re going to do here in Minnesota, tell you the truth.”