Trump to Nominate Mehmet Oz To Be CMS Administrator
On Tuesday, Nov. 19, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Mehmet Oz, M.D., to be the next Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). POLITICO’s Ben Leonard wrote on Tuesday afternoon that “President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician and TV personality known as Dr. Oz, to be administrator of CMS. During the pandemic, Dr. Oz, 64, pushed unproven theories about Covid-19 cures, including hydroxychloroquine, that caught Trump’s eye. In 2022, Oz ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, losing to now-Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).”
In a statement released on Tuesday, Trump said that “Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake. Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country.”
Leonard wrote that “Oz has been a major supporter of Medicare Advantage, the program’s private sector alternative that has grown in popularity but has come under intense scrutiny for care denials and alleged overbilling. The pick continues a trend of Trump picking television fixtures for key administration roles, including Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary and Doug Collins for VA secretary. A person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak candidly said Oz was not among the early candidates on the list for the job. The Senate has to confirm Oz. As CMS Administrator, Oz would oversee a broad agency that provides coverage through Medicare, Medicaid and other programs to more than 160 million people.”
The Washington Post’s Hannah Knowles wrote that “Oz’s critics say he provided a platform for potentially dangerous medical advice while hosting “The Dr. Oz Show.” Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, also has sparked concern from health experts. Trump has suggested he wants to cut ‘waste’ in entitlement programs. He reiterated that in his Tuesday announcement, saying Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” Trump’s team has said that he wants to preserve popular programs such as Medicare despite those calls for cutbacks. But Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans have begun discussing potential changes to Medicaid to offset the costs of extending tax cuts, The Washington Post reported this week.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times’s Noah Weiland, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Dani Blum wrote that “The selection of Dr. Oz, who lost to John Fetterman in 2022 in a race to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate, is likely to be seen as a major surprise, even in a health department that could be led by another unconventional pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also continued a trend of Mr. Trump selecting television personalities to oversee federal agencies. His candidates to run the Defense and Transportation Departments have been working for Fox News and Fox Business.”
The Times reporters further wrote that “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversee several of the country’s largest government programs, providing health coverage to more than 150 million Americans. They regulate health insurance and set policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for many medical services. About a quarter of all federal spending runs through the centers.”
They added that “Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon and the son of Turkish immigrants, does not have experience running a large federal bureaucracy. But he has weighed in on Medicare policy, coauthoring a 2020 opinion column in Forbes arguing for a universal health coverage system, in which every American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan. The coverage expansion, the column said, would be financed by an ‘affordable 20 percent payroll tax.’ Dr. Oz has frequently clashed with medical experts. In the early days of the pandemic, he promoted the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to ward off the coronavirus. A decade ago, he went before a Senate panel and was chastised for selling so-called miracle weight loss pills without substantial proof that they worked. In his run for Senate, Dr. Oz leaned on conservative anger toward pandemic policies that he said ‘took away our freedom.’”
In his announcement of Oz, Trump added that ““Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country,” Trump said. “He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.”
This is a developing story. We will provide updates as new developments warrant.
