Since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump has seized headlines with a series of alarming appointments for his incoming administration. Many lack the basic qualifications for their respective posts; nearly all can be fairly characterized as MAGA loyalists.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV personality and failed Republican Senate candidate, is among the more heavily scrutinized picks—and for good reason. Oz is a celebrity doctor without any experience running a large federal bureaucracy, now being tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a massive agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. Oz also boasts a long history of peddling dubious scientific theories and treatments.
But Oz’s remarkable lack of qualifications does not appear to have dimmed Republican excitement. In fact, they seem thrilled. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he was “very excited” about the nomination; Sen. Tommy Tuberville went as far as to call Oz an “all-star” candidate. Here’s what to know about Oz and why he could be the perfect vessel to help achieve the party’s long-sought goal of dramatically gutting safety net programs.
He Has a Long History of Peddling Pseudoscience
Trained as a heart surgeon, Oz rose to fame as a daytime TV personality. In the 2000s, he made frequent appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where the eponymous TV host dubbed him “America’s Doctor.” He then moved on to his own show in 2009. Throughout his 13 years on air, Oz repeatedly came under fire for pushing questionable remedies, including sketchy weight-loss supplements that landed him in the hot seat with the US Senate.
“My show is about hope,” Oz told senators in 2014. “We’ve engaged millions in programs, including programs we did with the CDC, to get folks to realize there are different ways they can rethink their future.”
In 2011, Oz told viewers to stop drinking apple juice out of concern that it contained dangerous levels of arsenic. The FDA slammed the advice, calling it “irresponsible and misleading to” make such a suggestion.
Throughout the pandemic, Oz encouraged people to use hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, malaria medication that then-President Donald Trump heralded as an effective treatment for Covid. (It is not.) In emails reported by the Washington Post, Oz even urged Jared Kushner to help expedite the medication to patients, writing, “We have a potential pandemic solution at our fingertips.”
Oz’s previous support for Joseph Mercola, an osteopath who’d eventually become one of the leading spreaders of Covid misinformation, was also condemned. As my colleague David Corn reported:
With his cheerleading for hydroxychloroquine, Oz helped distort the national public conversation about Covid. But his greater impact on the pandemic might be his previous support for Mercola. Advancing the career of the fellow who would become a top promoter of Covid misinformation—and whose efforts may have prompted many Americans to not become vaccinated and, thus, face terrible consequences—hardly meets the oath that Oz once swore: first, do no harm.
Oz Has Invested in Private Health Care Programs
One of the major concerns raised by Oz’s critics is whether he will cut funding to Medicare and Medicaid. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s advisers are preparing to cut Medicaid, which currently serves about 80 million low-income people, in addition to a slew of other safety-net programs, to offset the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
Oz does not appear to have taken any public positions concerning Medicaid. However, he has been a vocal supporter of the privatization of health care programs. In 2020, he wrote an op-ed supporting Medicare Advantage, a private coverage option supported by Trump and Project 2025.
As William Gavin at Quartz reported, Oz has previously disclosed owning at least $600,000 of stocks in companies that benefit from private Medicare services, raising serious concerns that, if confirmed, Oz could stand to finally benefit from the services his agency oversees.
Experts have long warned that privatizing Medicare is not a viable solution for cutting government waste, and will instead potentially make health care far more inaccessible for vulnerable communities.
But there is some reason to be hopeful. As my colleague Julia Métraux reported, existing laws will make it somewhat challenging for Oz to completely wreck Medicare.
His Peers Have Questioned His Ethics—A Lot
For nearly as long as Oz has been famous, peers have questioned his motives. In 2011, ABC News’ Richard Besser accused Oz of fearmongering, stating his apple juice claims reminded him of “screaming fire in a crowded theater.” In 2015, doctors wrote a letter calling for Columbia University to cut its ties to Oz, stating that Oz had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” It didn’t work at the time. But seven years later, as Oz campaigned for Senate, the university finally severed its ties.
“It took Columbia far too long to remove Oz from its otherwise distinguished medical faculty,” Dr. Henry Miller, of the Pacific Research Institute, in California, told MedPage Today. Miller called Oz “an unethical grifter whose claims and pronouncements were not supported by science, and were injurious to consumers—in the interest of financial benefit to Oz himself.”
In 2017, academics wrote a paper titled The Case of Dr. Oz: Ethics, Evidence, and Does Professional Self-Regulation Work?, in which they called the media personality “a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor.”
His Failed Senate Campaign Was Rife With Ableism
While running for Senate, Oz’s campaign also took several ableist potshots at his competitor, Sen. John Fetterman. “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life,” Oz’s senior communications officer told Business Insider after Fetterman poked fun at the infamous crudité video, “then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.”
Oz’s campaign also mocked Fetterman in September 2022 by including the following line in a press release: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”
