Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former prominent television host and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, poses for a portrait in front of a polling station during the primary election in Rockledge, Pennsylvania, May 17, 2022.
Hannah Beier | Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he will be Dr. Nominate Mehmet Oz – prominent television host and former US Senate candidate – as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
CMS operates or oversees programs that provide health insurance to about half of Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Obamacare marketplace Healthcare.gov.
Those four programs account for $1.6 trillion in spending, or nearly 25% of the total federal budget, which Trump highlighted when he announced that Oz, a heart surgeon, would be his choice to lead CMS, a division of the health system – and Ministry of Social Affairs.
Trump said last week that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, to be HHS secretary.
Previously, Oz hosted The Dr. for more than a dozen years. Oz Show,” a syndicated daytime television program. He was the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022, losing to Democrat Senator John Fetterman.
“America is facing a health crisis, and there may not be a doctor more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.
“He is an outstanding 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 get to grips with the disease industrial complex and all the terrible chronic illnesses it has left in its wake.
“Our broken health care system is hurting everyday Americans and putting a strain on our country’s budget,” Trump said.
“Dr. “Oz will play a leading role in advancing disease prevention so we get the best outcomes in the world for every dollar we spend on health care across our great country,” Trump said. “It will also reduce waste and fraud in our nation’s most expensive government agency, which accounts for a third of our nation’s health care spending and a quarter of our entire federal budget.”
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure is the current CMS administrator.
As a child of Turkish immigrants, Oz has dual American and Turkish citizenship. During his Senate campaign, he vowed to renounce his Turkish citizenship if elected.
Trump has been a vocal critic of Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is unofficially known, and tried – and failed – in his first year in the White House to get Congress to repeal the law, which restricts the ability of many people to buy individual health care , Grants provide insurance coverage.
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