WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz, the author and former television host, to serve as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a powerful agency that oversees health insurance programs covering more than 150 million Americans.
The selection of Oz, who lost to John Fetterman in 2022 in a race to represent Pa. in the Senate, was a surprise to many close watchers of the agency, even in a health department that could be led by another unconventional pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also continued a trend of Trump selecting television personalities to oversee federal agencies. His candidates to run the departments of Defense and Transportation have been working for Fox News and Fox Business.
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.
The centers are part of the Department of Health and Human Services, which also includes the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their presence among those high-profile divisions has sometimes led to their work being overshadowed, despite their enormous influence in the American health system.
“CMS touches virtually every family in America through Medicaid and Medicare, and it’s probably the most challenging technical, policy and political job in government,” said Drew Altman, the president of KFF, a health research group. “Even small almost daily decisions at CMS are billion-dollar decisions that affect industries and patients with serious illnesses who really care.”
In a statement announcing his choice, Trump said that Oz would “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 noted that Oz had “won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices.”
Oz, a heart surgeon and the son of Turkish immigrants, does not have experience running a large federal bureaucracy. Past leaders of the agency have typically had experience working in roles that dealt broadly with health insurance policy, including government positions.
But Oz has also frequently clashed with other medical experts. In the early days of the pandemic, he promoted the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to ward off the coronavirus, medicines that were shown to be ineffective in treating the virus. A decade ago, he went before a Senate panel and was chastised for hyping so-called miracle weight loss products without substantial proof that they worked.
“Even putting aside the raft of alarming pseudoscience Dr. Oz has previously endorsed, it is deeply disappointing to see someone with zero qualifications being announced to head up such a critical agency,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who used to lead the Senate health committee, said in a statement.
Oz has weighed in on Medicare policy, helping to write 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,” and would eliminate employer health coverage and the government Medicare program.
That strategy would be far out of the mainstream of conservative health policy. In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris, then a candidate for president, proposed a version of a “Medicare for All” plan with similarities to Oz’s 2020 idea. Instead of replacing private coverage with a government-run system, as some of her Democratic rivals had done, Harris called for allowing people to choose between a government Medicare program and plans modeled on Medicare Advantage.
Oz will also be pressed to outline an agenda for Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that covers more than 70 million poor and disabled Americans. Republican lawmakers and conservative policy experts in recent months have pressed for major changes to the program, including cutting federal funding for it and tightening rules for eligibility.
The agency also oversees insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. Trump unsuccessfully tried to overturn large portions of the law during his first term, and has been vague about his ambitions for it now. Oz has supported the law’s goal of expanded health insurance coverage, though he has been critical of its details, characterizing it as a government takeover of the health care system.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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