Trump Taps Dr. Oz to Take Control of Medicare and Medicaid

Dr. Mehmet Oz’s years of making dubious medical claims on his daytime talk show weren’t enough to win him a Senate seat in 2022. But for Donald Trump, they’re enough to qualify him to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which provides healthcare to over 160 million people

Trump announced his latest Cabinet nominee on Tuesday, writing, “There may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again.” The nomination will bring Oz back to the Senate chamber for his confirmation hearing; he was previously there in 2014, when he was upbraided by both Democrats and Republicans over his shilling for bogus weight loss products. 

Trump went on to say of Oz: “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.” 

Trump said Oz would 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. He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which his a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.”
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Like RFK Jr. — Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services — Oz has a long history of peddling medical misinformation. Along with the aforementioned diet pills, he made suspect claims about arsenic levels in apple juice (“irresponsible and misleading,” the FDA said). And during the pandemic, Oz, like Trump, promoted hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 despite a serious lack of evidence that it was effective (Oz also happened to own a bunch of stock in companies that make hydroxychloroquine).

In 2014, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that at least half of the medical advice Oz gave on his daytime TV talk show was bunk. The following year, a group of prominent doctors called on Columbia University to boot Oz from its faculty due to his “disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” Columbia and Oz did finally end their relationship in 2022, after Oz launched his failed Senate campaign in Philadelphia (he eventually lost to Democrat John Fetterman).