Dr. Oz Huddles With House Republicans Crafting Anti-Fraud Reconciliation Bill
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, huddled with House Republicans on Wednesday to discuss anti-fraud measures, as House leadership seeks to pass a fraud-focused party-line budget bill.
On Wednesday morning, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters Oz was coming to meet with a group of House Republicans attempting to craft a budget reconciliation bill.
“We’ve had a working group for reconciliation 3.0 that I’ve been involved in for probably close to two months now, and we’ve had some very productive conversations,” Scalise said. “Dr. Oz has had some ideas … I thought it would be helpful if he shared that with the entire group, this working group on reconciliation 3.0.”
Reconciliation is a process that allows for sweeping budgetary changes with only a simple majority in the Senate. Republicans have already used reconciliation to enact tax cuts in July 2025 and are currently attempting to use it to fund immigration enforcement for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term.
“It’s dealing with fraud,” Scalise said of Republicans’ next reconciliation priorities. “Dr. Oz has identified areas of waste … that could potentially go over $100 billion of stolen money and we want to help him get that money back to the taxpayer.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., likewise said on Wednesday that another reconciliation package is imminent—although he has said as much on multiple occasions in the past year without one materializing.
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“Republicans are really proud of our work to address fraud, waste, and abuse in government,” said Johnson. “We’re going to have a third reconciliation bill that comes up in the coming weeks and you’ll see further attention to it paid there.”
Inside the Room
The meeting, held in the speaker’s office, drew major stakeholders.
Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., who chairs the Main Street Caucus—a group of Republicans mainly in battleground districts—came to the meeting, as did Republican Reps. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona and Mike Lawler of New York, both from some of the most hotly contested districts in the country.
Conservative hardliners also entered: Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, and Victoria Spartz of Indiana.
The meeting also included Reps. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, who chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which handles matters related to health care, as well as Rep. August Pfluger of Texas.
Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus of Republicans that began crafting a framework for an ambitious budget reconciliation package in January and has since worked to promote it.
Pfluger told the Daily Signal before the meeting that he believes aggressively targeting fraud in health care via reconciliation would help, rather than hurt, Republicans in swing districts.
“There’s many examples of pieces of legislation that would help get after the fraud, reduce it, cut spending in those areas, because those are tax dollars that are going to fraudulent purposes,” said Pfluger. “I think in those particular cases, we’re going to get a tremendous amount of support.”
He told the Daily Signal that many of the Study Committee’s proposals have been integrated into the reconciliation discussions.
“The lawmaking exercise is tough. We’re in a room, the RSC has led on this, we know what we want to propose as a roadmap, and that’s basically stayed the same since January. The only difference right now is that defense is a big deal,” said Pfluger.
The White House has requested a trillion-dollar defense budget. Since Senate Democrats are unlikely to grant this request, reconciliation would be a way for Republicans to bypass the bipartisan process.
“The president is asking for a plus-up on the defense side. He’s right to do so,” said Pfluger. “We need to recapitalize our military… So that’s really the only addition to the framework that we proposed in January.”
Oz’s Fraud Pitch
Emerging from the meeting, Guthrie said Oz presented the lawmakers with ways to combat fraud.
“We’re going to make sure the American taxpayer’s money is spent correctly and wisely,” he said. “We’re talking billions of dollars of fraud… not money being misspent. I mean, people purposely misdirecting money.”
Guthrie told the Daily Signal that they just discussed Medicare and Medicaid, but the conversations did not involve proposals for lowering premiums.
Lawler called the meeting simply a “good conversation about the work CMS is doing and specifically on the issues of fraud.”
Asked whether there were discussions of using reconciliation to address fraud going forward, Lawler smiled and replied as he crossed the threshold of the House chamber, “I’m not going to get into any of that.”
The Daily Signal asked Oz whether he had pitched the Republicans in the meeting on how to prevent fraud through reconciliation.
“No,” he replied. “I was just talking about the fact that we have a lot of fraud, like $100 billion worth, and if we get this right, we can not only help the Medicare trust fund last a lot longer, but reduce overall cost of care.”
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