Donald Trump has nominated Mehmet Oz, best known globally as Dr Oz, to serve as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator.
“Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country’s budget,” wrote Trump in his announcement of Oz’s nomination.
“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.”
Trump emphasized that he plans to have Oz work closely with Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health and human services secretary, “to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake”.
Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist who ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential race and adopted a slogan of “make America healthy again”, an offshoot of Trump’s “make America great again”.
The combination of Kennedy and Oz in leading health policy roles will receive significant pushback from health organizations. Oz’s role does not require Senate confirmation, while Kennedy’s does.
Oz previously praised Kennedy’s appointment, saying: “Americans need better research on healthy lifestyle choices from unbiased scientists, and @RobertKennedyJr can help as HHS secretary.” Oz’s most recent post on X promotes a multivitamin and supplement store.
The move comes after Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022, losing to John Fetterman but securing Trump’s endorsement.
Fetterman said of Oz’s nomination: “Well, I’ve been very, very clear if Dr Oz agrees to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m absolutely going to vote for the dude,” according to news outlet Notus.
Before his Senate run, Oz was the eponymous host of the Dr Oz Show and a frequent guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where he often provided medical advice. He is a cardiothoracic surgeon who co-founded a cardiac care center earlier in his career and taught at Columbia University. Like Trump, he gained national attention through reality television.
His advice has proven so controversial that a 2014 British Medical Journal study declared half of it “baseless or wrong”. A year later, in 2015, a sizable group of doctors wrote to Columbia’s dean of medicine, criticizing the school’s partnership with him and calling it “unacceptable”.
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz promoted malaria drugs including hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus in an appearance on Fox News, calling the discredited treatments a “gamechanger”. His comments on the drug captured Trump’s attention, CNN reported at the time.
