WASHINGTON — President-elect Trump has selected the surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the transition announced Tuesday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is an influential agency that sets policy that impacts payments for hospitals, doctors, 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 take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible 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 endorsement. Though Oz has touted astrology as a medical tool and promoted a variety of dietary supplements, he also endorsed vaccines and masks. He has also used his platform to tout private Medicare plans.
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Oz found fame as a health care expert on Oprah Winfrey’s show for five years. He later launched his own program, the Dr. Oz show, in 2009. Trump appeared on that show during his 2016 campaign and presented Oz with the clean bill of health that Trump received from his physician.
Oz spent the bulk 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 facing pressure to do so for nearly a decade.
Oz has faced Senate grilling before for his promotion of weight-loss products on his show. He told senators in 2014 that his image and quotes were used unfairly to hawk scam products.
This time around, early signs from the Senate are positive.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who sits on the committee that will handle Oz’s nomination, wrote on the social platform X: “Glad to hear Dr. Oz has been nominated for CMS administrator. It has been over 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 incentivize disease prevention and “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” The vast majority of spending at CMS goes to pay for care for individuals in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
While 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.
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Right-wing think tanks and policy experts have suggested moving more people to privatized Medicare, or Medicare Advantage, and cutting costs in Medicaid through work requirements, block grants and other reforms.
Oz has repeatedly promoted Medicare Advantage on his TV show and on social media.
“Believe it or not, it is possible to get health insurance plans now with a zero dollar monthly premium,” Oz said in a video posted to his YouTube channel in August. “Millions of people already are doing it and so could you.”
He’s even promoted a much more radical idea: Enrolling most Americans in Medicare Advantage plans as a path toward universal health insurance coverage.
In 2020, he co-wrote an opinion piece in Forbes with former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson touting the benefits of replacing private insurance, employer-sponsored insurance, and traditional Medicare with Medicare Advantage plans. The pair suggested funding “Medicare Advantage For All” using an “affordable 20% payroll tax.” People on Medicaid would not be affected.
Researchers and government watchdogs consistently find that the private insurers who run Medicare Advantage plans inappropriately deny coverage for services and maintain narrow provider networks. Those insurers have also been found to collect billions of dollars in dubious payments from the government.
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Oz appeared with RFK Jr. at a party in Palm Beach, Fla. the day before the election. While RFK Jr. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has spurned 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 spouting scientific misinformation and taking evidence-based and nuanced stances that place him well outside the Republic mainstream.
He has used his audience to market “raspberry ketones,” claiming 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, as it marketed green coffee bean extract as another weight-loss supplement. The Federal Trade Commission banned the company from making deceptive claims about its health benefits and extracted a $9 million settlement.
Oz has also taken stances that place him at odds with Trump and others in his health care orbit. In March 2020, Oz suggested that the U.S. should copy China’s zero-tolerance Covid-19 lockdowns, even as Trump and other conservatives later cast lockdowns as potentially worse than the pandemic itself. (Oz disavowed his past support for lockdowns during his Senate run in 2021.)
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Notably, he has also pushed back on a popular anti-abortion talking point: that a fetus’ heart begins beating at roughly six weeks post-conception. Later, during his Senate campaign, he said he supported the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and that abortion is “murder” at any stage of pregnancy.
At times, Oz has also been a strong backer of vaccines, calling Covid-19 vaccines “darn effective,” and masks, devoting several segments of his show in 2020 to teaching viewers how to wear face coverings meant to guard against coronavirus transmission. And in 2019, amid a cluster of measles outbreaks nationwide, he enthusiastically promoted the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. Research later showed that, following Oz’s endorsement, 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 proved his willingness to toe the party line, perhaps most notably via 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 post: “Roses are red, violets are blue, Dr. Fauci lied to you.”
