WASHINGTON – President-elect Trump has selected surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it was announced Tuesday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is an influential agency that sets policies that affect payments to hospitals, physicians and insurers. It oversees Medicare and Medicaid, as well as health plans sold under the Affordable Care Act.
“Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to tackle the disease industrial complex and all the terrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in a statement. The role of CMS administrator requires Senate confirmation.
Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon turned television star, lost a 2022 bid as a Republican for Senate to Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), even though he had Trump’s support. Although Oz has touted astrology as a medical tool and promoted a variety of nutritional supplements, he also endorsed vaccines and masks. He has also used his platform to promote private Medicare plans.
Oz rose to fame as a health care expert on Oprah Winfrey’s show for five years. He later launched his own program, the Dr. Oz show. Trump appeared on that show during his 2016 campaign and presented Oz with the clean bill of health that Trump received from his doctor.
Oz spent most of his medical and academic career at Columbia University, where he was a professor of medicine and a celebrated cardiothoracic surgeon. In 2022, Columbia cut ties with him after nearly a decade of pressure to do so.
Oz has been through Grilling the Senate rather for his promotion of slimming products on his show. He told senators in 2014 that his image and quotes were being unfairly used to promote scam products.
This time the first signals from the Senate are positive.
Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician serving on the committee that will consider Oz’s nomination, wrote on the social platform Oz has been nominated for CMS administrator. It has been more than a decade since a physician has been at the helm of CMS, and I look forward to discussing his priorities.”
At CMS, Trump said Oz will boost disease prevention and “reduce waste and fraud within our nation’s most expensive government agency.” The vast majority of spending at CMS goes to care for individuals in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Although Trump promised during his presidential campaign not to cut Medicare’s budget, he has not publicly discussed his plans for Medicaid, the program for millions of low-income Americans.
Right-wing think tanks and policy experts have proposed moving more people to privatized Medicare, or Medicare Advantage, and lowering costs in Medicaid through work requirements, blocking subsidies and other reforms.
Oz has repeatedly promoted Medicare Advantage on his TV show and on social media media.
“Believe it or not, it is now possible to get health insurance with a monthly premium of zero dollars,” Oz said in a video posted to his YouTube channel in August. “Millions of people are already doing it, and so can you.”
He has even promoted a much more radical idea: enrolling most Americans in Medicare Advantage plans as a path to universal health insurance coverage.
In 2020 he co-wrote a op-ed in Forbes with George Halvorson, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, touting the benefits of replacing private insurance, employer-sponsored insurance, and traditional Medicare with Medicare Advantage plans. The couple proposed funding “Medicare Advantage For All” with an “affordable 20% payroll tax.” People on Medicaid would not be affected.
Researchers and government Watchdogs consistently find that the private insurers that administer Medicare Advantage plans improperly deny coverage for services and maintain narrow provider networks. It has also been found that these insurers are collecting billions of dollars in questionable payments from the government.
Oz appeared with RFK Jr. at a party in Palm BeachFlorida the day before the election. While RFK Jr.’s choice Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services has rejected the influence of pharmaceutical manufacturers, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was one of the donors to Oz’s Senate bid.
Throughout his career, Oz has oscillated between spreading scientific disinformation and taking evidence-based and nuanced positions that place him far outside the Republic’s mainstream.
He has used his audience to market “raspberry ketones.” to claim they helped burn body fat despite a lack of supporting data from human studies. He invested in a company and then featured it on his show because it was marketing green coffee bean extract as another weight loss supplement. The Federal Trade Commission banned the company from making misleading claims about its health benefits and reached a $9 million settlement.
Oz has also taken positions that put him at odds with Trump and others in his health care orbit. In March 2020, Oz suggested that the US should copy China’s zero-tolerance Covid-19 lockdowns, even as Trump and other conservatives later called the lockdowns potentially worse than the pandemic itself. (Oz disavowed his previous support for lockdowns during his 2021 Senate election campaign.)
Notably, he also reversed a popular anti-abortion talk: that a fetus’s heart starts beating about six weeks after conception. Later, during his Senate campaign, he said he supported the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and so abortion is ‘murder’ at any stage of pregnancy.
Oz has also been a strong proponent of vaccines at times, calling Covid-19 vaccines “damn effective” and masks, and he devoted several segments of his 2020 show to teaching viewers how to wear face coverings intended to protect against the transmission of the coronavirus. And in 2019, amid a cluster of measles outbreaks across the country, he enthusiastically promoted the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Research later found that, after Oz’s approval, people who watched his show were more than twice as likely to view the vaccines as “low risk.”
But since entering the world of high-profile Republican politics, he has proven his willingness to toe the party line, perhaps most prominently through his newfound vitriol for Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
On Valentine’s Day 2022, during a heated Republican primary against David McCormick (now Senator-elect), Oz wrote in a social media message: “Roses are red, violets are blue, Dr. Fauci lied to you.”