Trump hires celebrity physician Mehmet Oz to oversee CMS

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to nominate longtime celebrity physician and former GOP Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to head the federal department responsible for Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump said he would nominate Oz to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a role that oversees the coordination and implementation of major health care programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Affordable Care Act.

“Our broken health care system is harming ordinary Americans and crushing our nation’s budget,” Trump said in a statement. “Dr. Oz will be a leader in encouraging disease prevention so that we achieve the best outcomes in the world for every dollar spent on health care in our great country. It will also reduce waste and fraud in our nation’s most expensive government agency, which accounts for a third of our nation’s health care spending and a quarter of our entire national budget.

Although he made a name for himself as an accomplished heart surgeon turned television showman, Oz has also long been criticized for promoting a questionable miracle diet pills and other medical advice that other doctors have deemed inaccurate and unscientific.

In 2022, he ran for the Pennsylvania Senate as a “conservative outsider” and was defeated by Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. The race was brutally personal at times, with Fetterman recovering from a stroke and Oz questioning Fetterman’s fitness to hold office.

Fetterman indicated he would vote to confirm Oz if his former rival committed to protecting Medicare and Medicaid.

“If Dr. Oz cares about protecting and preserving Medicare and Medicaid, I vote for the guy.” the senator posted on X.

Trump, who knew Oz from their shared experience on television, endorsed him in a crowded GOP primary against Dave McCormick in 2022. McCormick won this year’s Pennsylvania Senate race against Sen. Bob Casey, the Associated Press announced earlier this month.

The election will be rerun due to the slim margin, but if the result holds, McCormick would be able to join Fetterman in voting for Oz. McCormick offered his congratulations to Oz on Tuesday night.

“I look forward to working with you,” McCormick wrote on X.

Oz gained fame for his recurrent appearances on medical segments as a health expert Oprah Winfrey show before he created his own daytime series, The Doctor Oz Show. He turned this into lucrative sponsorship deals, recurrent media appearances and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Oz attended Harvard University, where he played football and water polo, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical and business schools. He was born in Cleveland to Turkish immigrants and has dual citizenship in Turkey.

During the 2022 campaign, Oz emphasized that health care is of the utmost importance, saying he would like to “reorient American health care around empowering patients and providing individualized treatments and therapies in a way that lowers costs for both families and the entire system”.

Trump’s statement said Oz’s mandate would be to cut costs and work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to confront the disease industrial complex and all the terrible chronic diseases left in this wake.” “