The Senate has confirmed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, placing the former TV personality in charge of two health programs used by millions of Americans.
The vote to confirm Oz fell along party lines, with 53 Republicans for and 45 Democrats against. Democrats have criticized Oz as a potential threat to Medicaid as Republicans consider cuts to the program, which provides health insurance at low or no cost to poor people.
Oz has said he plans to tackle waste and fraud in the healthcare system, and he has echoed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s emphasis on reducing the cost of healthcare by confronting an epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
“We have a generational opportunity to fix our health care system and help people stay healthy for longer,” Oz said during his confirmation hearing last month.
President Trump, while nominating Oz, said "there may be no physician more qualified and capable... to make America healthy again."
Trained as a heart surgeon, Oz became a household name as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show before launching his own talk show, which ran from 2009 to 2022. He is known for his advocacy of alternative medicine and a holistic approach to wellness that emphasizes diet and lifestyle.
Democrats have criticized Oz as a quack who has peddled dubious treatments, and they say he will advance an agenda to privatize government health insurance that poor and vulnerable people depend on.
Oz deflected questions about Medicaid cuts when grilled by the Senate last month, but he pledged to tackle insurance fraud in Medicare Advantage, a privately run version of Medicare that Oz had long supported in his career as a TV personality.
The doctor was critical of the use of "upcoding" to jack up the cost of treatment by listing questionable diagnoses. He also suggested using automation to reduce delays and costs tied to prior authorization, which insurance companies require to certify the medical necessity of certain procedures.
"If you're going to have a knee replacement and you can bend your knee more than 120 degrees, you don't get to get the knee replacement -- or whatever number you want to put in there,” he said. “And then, if we know those numbers ahead of time, like a credit card -- credit card approval doesn't take you three months – you know immediately whether the transaction's approved or not. We will be able to do something similar so that pre-authorization could happen rapidly.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which Oz now leads, has an annual budget of $2.6 trillion and oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare, which collectively provide health coverage to about half of Americans.
Medicaid provides health coverage at low or no cost for poor people, while Medicare covers people above age 65 and younger people who are disabled.
About 300 CMS employees are facing layoffs as part of Secretary Kennedy's restructuring of the Health and Human Services Department, which includes CMS. While thousands of workers have been fired across HHS, Kennedy has said Medicare and Medicaid won't be impacted.
