Trump picks Dr. Oz to lead Medicare and Medicaid
President-elect Donald Trump (R) has picked celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz (L) to lead CMS. Here they're seen together during a rally at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport November 5, 2022 in Latrobe, Pa., when Oz was running for Senate in that state. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump nominated celebrity physician Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump made the announcement Tuesday on Truth Social and in a press release to reporters.
"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 the announcement.
CMS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that Kennedy will lead if his nomination is confirmed. CMS manages Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for individual insurance, representing health coverage for 155 million Americans.
Trump's announcement notes that Oz graduated from Harvard, and earned a joint MD and MBA from the University of Pennsylvania — and that he won nine Daytime Emmys for the Dr. Oz Show.
Oz, 64, is a cardiothoracic surgeon who hosted a TV talk show focused on health for a decade. He built his TV career after being a frequent guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Oz faced criticism for giving Kennedy and other vaccine denialists a platform in appearances on his show. During the pandemic, Oz boosted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 without evidence.
Oz ran for Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania in 2022, and he vented his frustrations with the health establishment on the campaign trail. Trump endorsed him but Oz lost to Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat. During his Senate bid, NPR reported that he argued that the government had "patronized and misled" the public during the COVID pandemic. "COVID-19 became an excuse for the government and elite thinkers who controlled the means of communication to suspend debate," he said.
Oz has promoted questionable health advice to national television audiences. In 2014, he testified before the Senate after being accused on false advertising for supplements he promoted on his show. In 2015, ten doctors wrote a letter urging Columbia University's medical school l to fire him, arguing that much of the advice on his TV show has been found to be unsupported by scientific evidence, and in some cases, contradicted by it.
Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, wrote on X that Oz is "unfit" to run CMS. "He peddles conspiracy theories on vaccines & fake cures. He profits from fringe medical ideas. By nominating RFK Jr & Mehmet Oz, Trump is giving his middle finger to science," wrote Gostin on X.
