Former talk show host Mehmet Oz was questioned Monday about his citation of a study on the television-watching habits of Medicaid recipients.
During an Aspen Institute event in Washington, Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, spoke with CNBC senior health care reporter Bertha Coombs about the Trump administration’s “passionate desire to get people to believe they have agency over their future.” This involves re-examining Medicaid work requirements, 65-year-old Oz said.
“If you sit at home as an able-bodied person on Medicaid—and on average you will watch 6.1 hours of television or leisure time at home—you actually don’t want that,” Oz said. “Opiate use rates skyrocket. People don’t want to sit at home doing nothing. They want to have opportunities.”
Coombs pushed back.
“That’s the example that you bring up, but there are a lot of people who are on Medicaid you are working,” she said.
“A lot of this paperwork becomes very burdensome and difficult and there have been people who have been disenrolled even though they actually still qualify,” Coombs continued. “There are a lot people who are on Medicaid who are there actually as caregivers, so they are working, they just don’t have an 80-hour job outside the home because they have a 24-hour job inside the home. So, I mean, what percentage of people really are sitting and just living off the dole and playing video games for six hours?”
Oz didn’t respond with a percentage, but noted that his earlier number about television-watching or leisure hours was from a published study. The Department of Health and Human Services later told the Daily Beast that Oz was referring to an American Enterprise Institute study from May.
“It’s one of several bits of data we have that we can get people—and let’s just say it’s 20 percent of who is on Medicare…who might want to do more than what they are currently doing,“ Oz said.
“If they don’t want to go to work because they want to do something else, then they can contribute by taking care of a loved one, volunteering, getting an education,” Oz added. “We are not satisfied just proving that you worked enough. That’s not the goal here, by itself.”
The study Oz cited looked at the activities of non-disabled Medicaid recipients between ages 19 to 64 without children and who were not in school. Data from 2019 and from 2021 through 2023 was collected through the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC).
Non-working Medicaid recipients reported an average of 4.2 hours of television or video games per day, according to the study. The number goes up to 6.1 hours when including socializing, relaxing and leisure activities. By contrast, working Medicaid recipients had 2.7 hours of television and video games, and 4.5 hours of overall leisure.
As for non-workers who weren’t on Medicaid, data for both television and video games (4.4 hours) and overall leisure (6.7 hours) were higher. Lastly, workers not on Medicaid reported a combined 4 hours on both.
The study from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, has its critics.
Four researchers at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health argued that the author, senior fellow Kevin Corinth, made “a gross undercount” of disabilities among low-income adults because the ASEC data set was too narrowly defined.
“First, by law, [Supplemental Security Income] benefits are reserved only for the most deeply impoverished adults with severe disabilities,” they write. “Nationally, only about 14% of low-income individuals with disabling conditions receive SSI—meaning millions of Medicaid beneficiaries with serious functional limitations are misclassified as ‘non-disabled.’”
They offer an example of a middle-aged woman with a serious heart condition who can work a few hours per week, and is therefore ineligible for SSI.
This person “may be seriously limited in how many hours she can work and may need a good deal of rest,” they continue. “But ASEC data would consider her an able-bodied adult who is ‘relaxing.’ Using her ‘leisure time’ to justify a work requirement grossly misrepresents her reality.”
Still, several Republican lawmakers have pointed to the AEI study as evidence that there exist more workers who can participate in the raised community engagement requirements in the GOP’s budget bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in July.
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