What The Hell America!

Dr. Mehmet Oz, once the star of the long-running TV program “The Dr. Oz Show,” cleared another hurdle today in his bid to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. CMS runs Medicare, Healthcare.gov, and Medicaid, which is the joint state and federal health insurance program for low-income people. Altogether, it provides health coverage for nearly half the country.

The Senate Finance committee voted along party lines Tuesday to recommend Oz to the full Senate. That vote is expected soon.

Here are five things to know about Oz and the job he’s up for.

1. Like Trump and RFK, Jr., being a celebrity is part of his career path. 

Oz’s first career was as a cardiothoracic surgeon at Columbia University. He is remembered by colleagues there as a hard-worker who seemed to never sleep and cared about his patients.

In the early 2000s, he began writing health books and going on television, and he eventually launched “The Dr. Oz Show” which ran for years. Oz got into some hot water for products he promoted on the show, especially weight loss products, and in 2015, ten doctors called for his dismissal from the university. (He was not dismissed, and his affiliation with the university continued for nearly a decade.) In 2021, he announced his move into politics with a Senate run as the Republican candidate in Pennsylvania — a race he narrowly lost.

2. The future of Medicaid is up in the air. 

Unlike many previous administrators, Oz didn’t work in health policy, but he does have experience treating patients on Medicare and Medicaid as a physician. During his hearing, he said the Columbia medical school is in an area of New York City “heavily populated by Medicaid patients, and I saw firsthand how our services [and] our health care system underserved these communities.”

He seemed sympathetic to the Republican idea that Medicaid should be exclusively for the population it was originally designed to serve, including pregnant women and people with disabilities. Since 2014, the Affordable Care Act enabled states to offer Medicaid to all low-income people, not just particular populations, and the program has grown.

Now, congressional Republicans are looking to drastically shrink Medicaid to pay for President Trump’s tax cuts. The House GOP budget outline asks the committee overseeing CMS to find $880 million in cuts, which would likely come from Medicaid.

Pressed for his position on these cuts by Democrats in his confirmation hearing, Oz was noncommittal, saying, “I cherish Medicaid,” and that, to protect the program, it has to be “viable at every level.”

“He dodged, he weaved, he simply wouldn’t answer,” Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D.-Ore., said in the Finance Committee hearing Tuesday.

Democrats on the committee slammed Oz for not committing to fight cuts to Medicaid. “I’m voting no because of what I see as a concerted effort by the Trump administration and some congressional Republicans to use Medicaid as an ATM to pay for tax breaks for the biggest, most successful corporations and wealthy individuals,” Sen. Tina Smith, D.-Minn., said Tuesday.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R.-Kan., who is also a physician, responded by defending Republican plans. “Republicans are here to save Medicaid,” he said, saying the program has gotten too big and too expensive and was unsustainable. “We want to strengthen Medicaid for the most vulnerable.”

3. Oz’s plans for Medicare are fuzzy.

Even with Republican lawmakers looking for cuts, the future of Medicare is more secure than Medicaid.

Still, the program is in flux as more and more seniors opt for the privatized version of it called Medicare Advantage, which allows beneficiaries to choose private insurance plans that the government pays for, over traditional, government-run Medicare.

Oz has filmed promotional videos about Medicare Advantage plans that are still up on his YouTube page, and are not clearly marked as ads. He also co-authored an opinion piece in 2020 arguing that “Medicare Advantage for All” could provide universal coverage for everyone, not just seniors, and “save our health-care system.” His financial disclosures also show he owned as much as $600,000 in stock in UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest Medicare Advantage insurers, although he said he would divest that interest if confirmed.

Critics of the program, which essentially privatizes Medicare, point to insurance companies cherry-picking enrollees who are younger and healthier and overcharging the program for treatment.

During the hearing earlier this month, Oz acknowledged some of these criticisms. “We’re actually apparently paying more for Medicare Advantage than we’re paying for regular Medicare — so it’s upside down,” Oz said. He cited a report from the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which found that the federal government “will pay $83 billion more for [Medicare Advantage] enrollees in 2024 than if those beneficiaries had instead been in [traditional Medicare].”

On Tuesday, Sen. Marshall called Medicare Advantage a “very broken system” and called for a bipartisan effort to reform it. Ranking Member Wyden had a different view. “Given Dr. Oz’s history of basically acting as a salesman for Medicare Advantage, putting him in charge of regulating these middlemen is almost like letting the fox guard the proverbial henhouse,” Wyden said.

4. He thinks being healthy is a “patriotic duty.”

Towards the end of his Senate hearing, Oz answered a question from Sen. Todd Young, R.-Ind., about how a healthier American population could help with high health care costs.

“I think it is our patriotic duty to be healthy,” Oz said. It feels better, it’s the right thing for your family, he added, “but it also costs a lot of money to take care of sick people who are sick because of lifestyle choices.”

At another point during the hearing he told the senators: “For anyone in this committee who was able to go running or exercising for 20 minutes yesterday, you probably did the equivalent of reducing $100 billion of expenses for Medicare and Medicaid just by being active — if Americans would do that every day, that’s what we’d experience.”

He also floated the idea of using federal guidance to incentivize patients to make healthy choices, such as instructing Medicare Advantage enrollees on how to use their benefits for nutritious food. This position fits in nicely with the “Make America Healthy Again” slogan of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will be Oz’s boss.

Some commentators characterized these statements as tone deaf, given Oz’s wealth and privilege. “There is no recognition that being able to afford groceries, let alone have time to cook them, is a prerequisite for achieving his version of ‘eating healthy,’ ” wrote author Virginia Sole-Smith.

5. He’s widely expected to be confirmed.

In his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Oz bantered easily with senators on both sides of the aisle, about potato chips with committee Chair Mike Crapo of Idaho and playing basketball with Ranking Member Wyden. (The hearing was much friendlier than the hearings for Secretary Kennedy, who was skewered by Democratic senators for his past controversial statements and views, although he was ultimately narrowly confirmed.)

Still, that friendliness did not translate to bipartisan support in the Finance Committee, which voted 14 to 13. All Republicans on the committee voted for him; all Democrats voted against him. Next, the nomination will be scheduled for a vote by the full senate. That’s expected in the coming days or weeks.