President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday said that he would nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz, the author and former television host, to serve as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a powerful agency that oversees health insurance programs covering more than 150 million Americans.
The selection of Dr. Oz, who lost to John Fetterman in 2022 in a race to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate, is likely to be seen as a major surprise, even in a health department that could be led by another unconventional pick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also continued a trend of Mr. Trump selecting television personalities to oversee federal agencies. His candidates to run the Defense and Transportation Departments have been working for Fox News and Fox Business.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversee several of the country’s largest government programs, providing health coverage to more than 150 million Americans. They regulate health insurance and set policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for many medical services. About a quarter of all federal spending runs through the centers.
In a statement announcing Dr. Oz as his choice to lead the agency, Mr. Trump said that Dr. Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” Mr. Trump noted that Dr. Oz had “won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices.”
Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon and the son of Turkish immigrants, does not have experience running a large federal bureaucracy. But he has weighed in on Medicare policy, coauthoring a 2020 opinion column in Forbes arguing for a universal health coverage system, in which every American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan. The coverage expansion, the column said, would be financed by an “affordable 20 percent payroll tax.”
Dr. Oz has frequently clashed with medical experts. In the early days of the pandemic, he promoted the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to ward off the coronavirus. A decade ago, he went before a Senate panel and was chastised for selling so-called miracle weight loss pills without substantial proof that they worked.
In his run for Senate, Dr. Oz leaned on conservative anger toward pandemic policies that he said “took away our freedom.”
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