ReutersDonald Trump has nominated Mehmet Oz, a doctor and former television host, to run the powerful agency that oversees the health care of millions of Americans.
“There is no doctor more qualified and capable of making America healthy again than Dr. Oz,” Trump said in a statement announcing his choice to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Oz trained as a surgeon before rising to fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s, later hosting his own TV show.
He has been criticized by experts for what he called poor health advice about weight-loss drugs and “miracle” cures, and malaria drugs for treating Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic. As suggested.
Trump’s transition team said in a statement that Oz “will work closely with [Health Secretary nominee] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would take on the disease industrial complex, and all the terrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”
Oz must be confirmed by the Senate next year before officially taking charge of the agency.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversees the nation’s largest health care programs, providing coverage to more than 150 million Americans. The agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for medical services.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2023, the US government spent more than $1.4 trillion on Medicaid and Medicare combined.
Trump said in a statement that Oz would “reduce waste and fraud within our nation’s most expensive government agency,” and the Republican Party platform called for increasing transparency, choice and competition, and improving health care and prescriptions. Promised to increase access to medicines.
Oz, 64, trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon – specializing in heart and lung operations – and worked at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City and Columbia University.
After appearing in dozens of Oprah segments, she started The Dr. Oz Show, where she gave viewers health advice.
But the line between promotion and science wasn’t always clear on the show, and Oz has recommended homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics have called “pseudoscience.”
During Senate hearings in 2014, he was criticized for endorsing unproven pills that he said would “literally burn fat out of your system” and “make your stomach fat.” will push the fat from”.
During those hearings, Oz said he never sold any specific nutritional supplements on his show. But it has publicly endorsed off-air products and its financial ties to health care companies in 2022. The fillings were revealed during the elections for the US Senate in Pennsylvania.
During the CoVID-19 pandemic, Oz promoted the anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which experts say are ineffective against the virus.
