President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he is nominating Dr. Mehmet Oz to join his administration as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.
“I am very pleased to nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz,” Trump announced Tuesday.
“America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social.
“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.”
“CMS operates or oversees health-care programs that provide coverage to about one out of every two Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Obamacare marketplace exchange Healthcare.gov.
“Those four programs account for $1.6 trillion in spending, or nearly 25 percent of the entire federal budget.”
Oz is the former host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” which was on the air for over 12 years. Before he got a show of his own, he regularly appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Fox News reported.
In 2022, he ran for the U.S. Senate, but lost to Democrat John Fetterman, despite securing an endorsement from Trump.
Related: Trump Announces He’s Going All-In on Mass Deportation Effort: National Emergency Declaration and Military Involvement in the Works
Legacy news outlets, still stinging from the bitter defeat of their preferred candidate on Nov. 5, continued their pattern of painting Trump’s appointments in a negative light.
“Oz is a household name and became a Trump world ally during a failed 2022 Senate run,” Axios acknowledged.
“But he has no experience running a large government bureaucracy like CMS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid and conducts other services like inspecting nursing homes.”
The New York Times made a point to mention that “Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon and the son of Turkish immigrants, does not have experience running a large federal bureaucracy.”
However, the Times added, “he has weighed in on Medicare policy, coauthoring a 2020 opinion column in Forbes arguing for a universal health coverage system, in which every American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan” that would be paid for with a 20 percent payroll tax.
Several outlets disparaged Oz for his efforts to promote the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, which USA Today claimed was “debunked.”
The Times noted that Oz’s Senate campaign “leaned on conservative anger toward pandemic policies that he said ‘took away our freedom.’”
