President-Elect Trump Announces Dr. Oz as His Pick for 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).

In a Nov. 19 Truth Social post, Trump said, "America is facing a healthcare crisis, and there may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again," Mr. Trump said in the post.

Oz, who was born in Cleveland, is a celebrity physician and TV personality known as Dr. Oz. According to droz.com, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a joint medical degree and MBA from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Wharton Business School in Philadelphia.

Oz has won nine Daytime Emmy awards for "The Dr. Oz Show” and was featured as a health expert for six seasons on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, CNBC reported that Dr. Oz had promoted hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, as a prospective COVID-19 treatment after speaking with experts who saw it as a viable treatment option.

In that same article, Brian Schwartz wrote, “…[Oz] has financial ties to at least two pharmaceutical companies that supply hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that he has floated as a possible COVID-19 treatment.”

According to the Mayo Clinic, “Hydroxychloroquine is not recommended as a treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Also, hydroxychloroquine doesn't prevent infection with the virus that causes COVID-19.”

In an article from Healthcare Innovation, Mark Hagland wrote, “POLITICO’s Ben Leonard wrote on Tuesday afternoon 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,’ Trump said in a statement Tuesday. ‘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.’”

Hagland added, “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.’”

Further, “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.’”

Hagland continued, “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.’”

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% payroll tax.’”

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. 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.”

“The article referenced in this story originally ran as “Trump to Nominate Mehmet Oz To Be CMS Administrator” on Healthcare Innovation, an Endeavor Business Media partner site.”