Mehmet Oz in July I stood in front of the camera and filmed TikTok about “how to overcome constipation”.
“Here’s the scoop on the poop brain loop,” Oz said confidently, delving into an enthusiastic suggestion of probiotic supplements to lend a hand you on a regular basis.
In the two years since losing the 2022 Senate to Democrat John Fetterman – a race into which Oz poured more than $27 million of his own money – he has largely disappeared from the political arena, selling vitamins as a global media ambassador for vitamin retailer iHerb social media.
Now he’s back and on track to become the man in charge of health care for 160 million Americans as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, also known as CMS.
“America is facing a health care crisis, and there may be no doctor more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in a statement announcing Oz as his choice. He claimed that Oz would address the “disease industrial complex” and promote disease prevention.
» READ MORE: Trump appoints Mehmet Oz to be central in charge of Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act
To achieve this, Oz, a cardiologist and former television personality who has lived in New Jersey for decades and also owns property in Pennsylvania, will face hearings aimed at re-airing some of the reputation-damaging details that ended his Senate bid . Oz will likely face questions about comments he has made regarding private and public health insurance, as well as scrutiny of his financial interests in pharmaceutical and medical companies.
But given Republicans’ four-seat majority in the Senate and a cadre of more controversial candidates, Oz’s nomination may be uncontroversial, heralding his political resurgence.
“He’s a very smart guy. He’s a thinking guy. … I think he has all the potential to be an excellent CMS administrator,” said former Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican who met Oz during his 2022 bid to replace Toomey.
“He will want to articulate a vision for the direction he thinks he wants the president to take at CMS, and then of course he will want to be prepared for hostile questions about his past, which is always part of the questioning process.”
Some of these questions have already begun.
Democrats demand answers on Medicare privatization
As soon as Oz was introduced as Trump’s nominee, Democrats and some nonpartisan physicians sharply criticized the nomination. Key Democratic senators, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sent a letter to Oz last month questioning his “previous support for Medicare privatization” — referring to his 2020 call for all seniors to be covered by private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage.
“Following this nomination, we write about our concerns about your support for eliminating Traditional Medicare and your deep financial ties to private health insurers,” the letter reads.
The criticism follows from the 2020 proposals by Oz and former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson, who in an article published in Forbes he suggested enrolling all Americans more than 65 people who were not covered by Medicaid were administered privately Medicare Advantage Plans.
They framed this proposal as a way to provide universal coverage in the private sector, as opposed to expanding Medicare for All.
“Private insurers operating the Medicare Advantage program are dramatically overcharging for care,” the senators wrote in a letter to Oz, citing an analysis by the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
As a 2022 Senate candidate, Oz continued to call for expanding Medicare Advantage, but stopped compact of calling for eliminating conventional Medicare during the campaign.
Lawmakers in the letter also cited Oz’s financial interests in UnitedHealth, the largest private insurer in Medicare Advantage, as a conflict of interest and asked whether he would divest from any financial holdings related to the insurance industry if confirmed for the position.
“Dr. Oz will cooperate with the Office of Government Ethics and the agency’s ethics designee, as all other nominees do,” said Nick Clemens, Oz’s spokesman for the Trump transition to J.D. Vance.
Brian Hughes, another spokesman for Trump’s transition to Vance, added that “all nominees and appointees will abide by the ethical responsibilities of their respective agencies.”
Trump’s transition team previously said Oz will stop promoting supplements if he is approved as a CMS administrator.
CMS’ core portfolio includes Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act Exchange, which sells subsidized insurance.
Medicare covers more than 2.9 million seniors and disabled Pennsylvanians, while Medicaid and CHIP provide health and long-term care to 3.1 million low-income children, pregnant women, adults, seniors and people with disabilities in the state. In total, these programs cover over 38% of the state’s population.
If both reports are confirmed, Oz will work under Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. his own reaction to comments he made against vaccines.
American doctor
Oz, 64, the son of Turkish immigrants and dual U.S.-Turkish citizenship, was born in Cleveland and raised in Wilmington. He is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.
A renowned heart surgeon, Oz also invented medical devices and became a TV regular after his performance Oprah Winfrey show.
He emerged as the front-runner in a crowded 2022 GOP primary, where he was endorsed by Trump and bombarded with tens of millions of dollars in attack ads highlighting certain themes that could resurface during his confirmation hearing.
He faced criticism for comments he made on television over the decades about questionable treatments. 2014 study he found less than half of the claims he made on his TV show were supported by evidence. Other critics spread: Fox News appearances since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when Oz called for reopening schools despite the rising death rate, he predicted it would come to fruition.
His popular TV show titled Introducing Dr. Ozat times he has promoted widely accepted health advice — he once hosted a renowned scientist to debunk the myth that the mRNA vaccine for Covid-19 changes human DNA.
But at other times, he used his platform to provide misleading – or downright false – medical advice.
Oz was among medical experts who touted hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug promoted by Trump during his first term, as a treatment for Covid-19, despite insufficient evidence. Oz featured several products on his show that claimed to “melt belly fat” with little evidence that they work. In 2014, he was hauled in for a hearing before a U.S. Senate panel to respond to his claims that green coffee extract was a “miracle” weight loss supplement.
Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Ore.), who is expected to become the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee during next year’s Oz confirmation hearing, is one of a handful of Senate Democrats who have publicly criticized the celebrity doctor.
“Dr. Oz is no stranger to spreading nonsense to innocent Americans without suffering consequences,” Wyden said. “The American people deserve a leader at CMS who will stand up to Big Pharma and the insurance fraudsters who mislead seniors and deny them basic health care, and I’m not sure the talk show host is ready for the fight.”
But in the company of more controversial candidates – such as TV host and former National Guard officer Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary – Oz may not count on a highly controversial nomination.
In fact, even Fetterman left the door open to supporting Oz, despite the vitriol between the men that has defined the 2022 race.
When former Fetterman campaign staffers reacted sharply to their senior boss choosing Oz as Trump’s pick, Fetterman said he was open to supporting Oz – as long as he kept Medicare.
“Our politics are obviously different and we have history, but I don’t have any bitterness,” Fetterman told CNN. “I have nothing against him.”
(*160*) Oz, a former TV star, running CMS would be quite a technical and unsightly post. This role is extremely critical, but it usually goes unnoticed – few people outside government are able to identify the current CMS administrator. And the mandate is largely about implementing the administration’s vision.
But some of Oz’s supporters, such as his former GOP Senate opponent Jeff Bartos, said the fact that a celebrity doctor was willing to work behind the scenes was “inspiring.”
“If you look at it as an arc, he was at the top of his profession in medicine, at the top of his profession in television and media. He almost reached the highest level of politics,” Bartos said. “…He really could do anything and he does.”
