President-elect Donald Trump says he will pick celebrity physician and former TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees both health insurance programs.

More than 150 million Americans now receive health care coverage from Medicare and Medicaid.  Because the agencies are so massive, they help set policy that guides the pricing of medical goods and services provided to Americans each day by doctors, hospitals and drug companies.

Trump already alarmed many last week with the announcement that he would appoint anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr. to run the giant Health and Human Services Department, of which CMS is a part.

In a statement, Trump said that Oz will “work closely with Robert Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” The New York Times reported. 

Trump also remarked 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, the son of Turkish immigrants, worked as a heart surgeon before helming a hugely successful daytime talk show, focused on health and medicine, from 2009 through 2022.

He went on to lose a 2022 bid to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate to Democrat John Fetterman. 

Oz emerged as a conservative firebrand during and after the pandemic, railing against policies he claimed “took away our freedom.”

His appointment is bound to send more shock waves through the medical establishment. During the pandemic, he was a vocal supporter of now-discredited COVID-19 “treatments” such as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. 

Earlier in his career, Oz was forced to testify before Congress for hawking miracle weight-loss pills without any proof of efficacy.

Reaction to Oz’ possible appointment came swiftly.

“Americans need a director of Medicare and Medicaid who will operate with the utmost integrity,” Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocate group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “They need someone who will crack down on insurers who want to deny care to the sick, providers who skimp on quality health care, corporations that want to privatize Medicare, and Big Pharma profiteers and ideologues who want to slash Medicaid and refuse care to low-income people.

“What they do not need is a health care huckster, which unfortunately Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have become, having spent much of his recent career hawking products of dubious medical value,” Weissman said.

As for the thorny issue of health care insurance, in 2020 Oz penned an opinion column in Forbes in which he called for a form of universal health coverage where any American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan. An “affordable 20 percent payroll tax” would pay for the scheme, he wrote. 

SOURCE: The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2024; Public Citizen, statement, Nov. 19, 2024

Source: HealthDay

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