Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid, gets his Senate hearing

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Who: Dr. Mehmet Oz

Nominated for: Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

You might know him from: The long-running daytime TV talk show “The Dr. Oz Show.” He ran as the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022. (He lost that race to Sen. John Fetterman, the Democrat.)

• He’s a cardiothoracic surgeon who first became famous as a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey show.
• He has faced lawsuits and a Congressional hearing for promoting unproven weight-loss treatments, like green coffee bean extract.

• He favors Medicare Advantage, a privatized version of Medicare, and has made the case for a single-payer-like system he called “Medicare Advantage For All.”

Watch Oz’s Senate confirmation hearing, set to start at 10 a.m. ET:

What does this role do? The administrator oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance plans at Healthcare.gov. Combined, those programs provide health insurance to about half of all Americans. The agency also has a budget of $1.2 trillion annually, although a significant portion of that could be on the chopping block when Congressional Republicans try to cut spending to pay for President Trump’s tax cuts.

CMS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy and Oz know each other well — Kennedy was a guest on Oz’s show, as was President Trump. During Trump’s first term, Oz served on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.

Like many of Trump’s health nominees, Oz was a critic of the COVID-19 public health response. He argued that the government had “patronized and misled” the public during the pandemic. “COVID-19 became an excuse for the government and elite thinkers who controlled the means of communication to suspend debate,” he said.

During his long television career, Oz’s promotion of dubious health products has gotten him into hot water. He has faced class action lawsuits and testified before the Senate after being accused of false advertising for supplements he promoted on his show. In 2015, 10 doctors wrote a letter urging Columbia University’s medical school to fire him, arguing that much of the advice on his TV show had been found to be unsupported or even contradicted by scientific evidence. Columbia did not fire him, citing academic freedom, and Oz responded to his critics both on his show and in a Facebook post.

“I bring the public information that will help them on their path to be their best selves,” Oz wrote in the post. “We provide multiple points of view, including mine which is offered without conflict of interest.”

Since he hasn’t done work in health policy previously, it’s hard to know how he will steer CMS and its trillion-dollar budget as Trump uses his second term to dramatically reshape the federal government.

CMS has already had layoffs, and its budget is a major target for cuts. The House GOP budget outline asks the committee overseeing CMS to find $880 million in cuts. That number has alarmed health policy experts. “Cuts of this magnitude will have devastating impacts on state budgets as well as the more than 70 million children, families, pregnant women, low-income adults, people with disabilities, and seniors who rely on Medicaid for their health insurance,” wrote Joan Alker of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families.

Senate Democrats on the Finance Committee have asked Oz for details of his position on privatizing Medicare by favoring the Medicare Advantage program and eliminating the traditional, government-run program. He co-authored an opinion piece in 2020 arguing that “Medicare Advantage for All” could provide universal coverage and “save our health-care system.”

Oz has an ally in Andy Slavitt, who served in the role of CMS administrator under President Barack Obama and helped with President Joe Biden’s COVID response. Slavitt says he didn’t know Oz until a few months ago, when Oz was nominated and they spoke on the phone for over an hour. “I found him to be very serious with a lot of humility, very smart, a good communicator and really excited to be in the role, and those are all good things,” he says, adding they now speak about once a week.

In an ethics filing released ahead of the hearing, Oz promised to sell his health care stock and leave his role as an adviser to iHerb, LLC, a nutritional supplement company that he has promoted on social media.

His financial disclosure showed that Oz owns between $5 million and $25 million in iHerb vested restricted stock units. His ethics agreement says he will divest those holdings within 90 days after confirmation, and that he “will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of this entity until I have divested it, unless I first obtain a written waiver.”

However, the financial disclosure leaves open the possibility that Oz could hold onto some of his iHerb holdings until the company goes public or is bought, according to Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush.

The iHerb language is “ambiguous,” Painter told NPR in February. “He will need to make it very clear that he’s going to be completely out of that company.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter to Oz just before the hearing asking him to go further in divesting from his financial interests in health care companies.

Sydney Lupkin contributed to this report.