Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former celebrity TV host and Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, poses for a portrait outside a polling location during the primary election in Rockledge, Pennsylvania, May 17, 2022.
Hannah Beier | Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz — celebrity TV host and former U.S. Senate candidate — as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator.
CMS operates or oversees programs that provide health coverage to about half of Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Obamacare marketplace exchange Healthcare.gov.
Those four programs account for $1.6 trillion in spending, or nearly 25% of the entire federal budget, which Trump highlighted when he announced that Oz, a heart surgeon, was his pick to lead CMS, a division of the Health and Human Services Department.
Trump said last week that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, as HHS secretary.
Oz previously hosted “The Dr. Oz Show,” a syndicated daytime television program, for more than a dozen years. He was the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania in 2022, losing to Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat.
“America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday.
“He is an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades. 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.
“Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country’s budget,” Trump said.
“Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country,” Trump said. “He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.”
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure is the current CMS administrator.
Oz has dual U.S. and Turkish citizenship, as a child of Turkish immigrants. During his Senate campaign, he vowed to renounce his Turkish citizenship if elected.
Trump has been a staunch critic of Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is informally known, and during his first year in the White House tried — and failed — to get Congress to repeal the law, which offers subsidies to many people who buy individual health insurance coverage.