Trump Nominates Television Quack Dr. Oz To Run Medicare And Medicaid

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Mehmet Oz, the controversial television doctor and failed Senate candidate for Pennsylvania who has routinely promoted pseudoscientific and unproven medical treatments, to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS.)

This is a critical position that — if Oz is confirmed — would put the television personality at the helm of a vast and consequential public agency that oversees and facilitates health coverage for roughly half of American citizens. Oz is trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon and was once a professor and vice-chair of surgery at Columbia University — though Columbia has since attempted to distance itself from the weight-loss drug-slinging TV doc — but has no experience running government agencies or large healthcare or insurance programs.

As The New York Times notes, the CMS oversees healthcare for over 150 million Americans, and is responsible for nearly one quarter of spending for the entire national budget. The CMS falls under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services, to which the conspiracy-peddling anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been nominated by the president-elect as head.

"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," Drew Altman, president of the health research group KFF, told the NYT. "Even small, almost daily decisions at CMS are billion-dollar decisions that affect industries and patients with serious illnesses who really care."

Medically speaking, Oz's baggage runs deep. In addition to being yet another Person on Television nominated to Trump's historically unqualified cabinet selections, Oz has routinely come under fire from his peers for irresponsibly using his platform and position as a physician in ways that have worked to undermine public health. To wit: during his unsuccessful 2022 bid for Pennsylvania's senate seat, a cohort of over 150 Keystone State physicians signed a letter condemning the TV star as a "major threat to public health" due to his well-documented history of spouting baseless and misleading medical treatments and theories, including dangerous misinformation about debunked alleged COVID-19 treatments.

And back in 2014, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that roughly half of all advice promoted on Oz's television show was either not supported or refuted by established medical research and knowledge. He's also sort-of-kind-of defended some types of incest in the past, so there's that.

Oz's penchant for hawking dubious supplements has gotten him in trouble, too — including with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who in 2014 chastised the celebrity doctor for championing multiple green coffee bean-based weight loss supplements that were later discredited as snake oil. Oz called the coffee supplements "magic" drugs; according to the Federal Trade Commission, which sued the pills' creator, they didn't live up to purported benefits and were marketed illegally through "bogus weight-loss claims and fake news sites."

"I don't get why you need to say this stuff when you know it's not true. When you have this amazing megaphone, why would you cheapen your show?" then-Democratic senator Claire McCaskill told Oz during the hearing, as quoted at the time by CNN. "With power comes a great deal of responsibility."

Oz is also, remarkably, the second alleged killer of puppies to receive a cabinet nomination (the first being North Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who in her memoir described shooting a puppy named Cricket in a gravel pit because it had annoyed her.)

In 2022, Jezebel conducted an extensive review of 75 studies published by Oz — who was billed as the studies' "principal investigator" — between the years 1989 and 2010, ultimately finding that his testing resulted in the deaths of 661 rabbits and rodents, 31 pigs, and 329 dogs and puppies, among other critters. Though animal testing is an unfortunate reality of medical research, there are animal welfare rules that those who conduct animal experimentation are required to follow — and Oz, according to whistleblower testimony and an internal Columbia investigation into his practices, frequently engaged in allegedly grotesque, inhumane, and poorly designed animal testing that violated the Animal Welfare Act. (Indeed, per Jezebel's reporting, Columbia was fined by the United States Department of Agriculture in 2004 for failure to comply with Animal Welfare Act standards.)

Oz has established himself as a loyal Trump supporter in recent years, earning a sought-after Trump endorsement during his 2022 campaign.

In social media posts announcing the nomination, Trump presented Oz and Kennedy as a bundled, health system-smashing deal.

"Dr. Oz will 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 wrote yesterday on social media. Adding that Oz will focus on "Disease Prevention," Trump claimed the TV star "will also cut waste and fraud within our Country's most expensive Government Agency."

As it stands, it's unclear how Oz might slash "waste and fraud" at the CMS. That said, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 — a playbook for a second Trump presidency, created by the former president's allies, which outlines a sweeping consolidation of power within the executive branch and overhauls of government agencies — calls for the use of AI within the agency to locate instances of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. (It's murky how it might actually deploy this imagined AI tool effectively or ethically, and didn't mention algorithmic bias, which has historically resulted in measurable healthcare harms.)

To that end, Oz has historically been in favor of more expansive universal healthcare policies, writing in a 2020 Forbes article that healthcare access should be expanded under a private Medicare Advantage plan funded by way of a "new dedicated 20 percent payroll tax." This position, however, stands in contrast to those commonly held in Trumpworld and in the ideological MAGA movement at large.

At the end of the day: do America's health and food systems suck? Yeah, they absolutely do, and broader, comprehensive reforms are needed. But while Oz might hold a real medical license, his public life has largely been an exercise of using his license to award undue credence to quackery and pseudoscience, presented under the collective guise of overall healthy living. He is, indeed, one of the original wellness influencers, entertaining unproven treatments, diets, and cures for the sake of — well, entertainment.

And between him and Kennedy, the latter of whom has for years traded on his family name while smoothly blending intuitive health advice with destructive and disproven nonsense, our healthcare systems — and the Americans who rely on them — deserve better.

More on Oz: Dr. Oz Accused of Killing Hundreds of Dogs, Puppies, Bunnies

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