Trump Picks Mehmet Oz to Run Agency That Oversees Medicare

News November 19, 2024 at 06:34 PM
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President-elect Donald Trump today said Dr. Mehmet Oz will be his nominee for the post of administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

CMS is the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that oversees Medicare. CMS also works with the Internal Revenue Service and the Employee Benefits Security Administration to regulate commercial health insurance.

If Oz is confirmed by the Senate to be CMS administrator, he could play a role in everything from writing Medicare Advantage plan marketing rules to determining whether HealthCare.gov continues to operate and how it advertises any services it continues to offer.

Trump, who previously named Robert Kennedy Jr. to be his HHS secretary nominee, announced the Oz pick in a post on Truth Social.

“Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in the post. “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.”

Mehmet Oz: Oz was born in Cleveland in 1960. His father was a heart surgeon and medical professor.

Oz earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a medical degree and a master’s degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania.

Oz is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon, meaning that he specialized in operating on hearts, lungs and other organs in the chest. He worked for years as a professor of surgery at Columbia’s medical school. While there and at a Columbia-affiliated teaching hospital, he helped develop devices related to heart surgery, including the left ventricular assist device.

From 2003 through 2022, he was a frequent guest on television talk shows and then the host of his own medical show, "The Dr. Oz Show."

The Oz show sometimes irritated other medical doctors by featuring guests who talked about topics such as faith healing and alternative medicine.

In 2022, he ran for a Senate seat as a Republican in Pennsylvania. He lost to John Fetterman.

While he was running for Senate, he expressed strong support for the Medicare Advantage program, and he said that he had "bravely argued against costly drugs, even as it made him a target of drug companies."

He gave few details about his views on health policy on the website, but he said he would seek to "expand access to private sector plans expanded by President Trump and beloved by seniors for their low costs and high quality that could be available to all Americans who want them."

Dr. Mehmet Oz. Photo: Ryan Collerd/Bloomberg

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