Trump taps Mehmet Oz to head office in charge of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act

President-elect Donald J. Trump said Tuesday he plans to nominate the longtime celebrity doctor and one-time Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz, to head the federal department in charge of Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump said he will nominate Oz as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, a role that oversees the coordination, and implementation of major health care programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act.

“Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country’s budget,” Trump said in a statement. “Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country. He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.”

While he made a name for himself as an accomplished cardiothoracic surgeon, Oz has also been long criticized for promoting questionable miracle diet pills and other medical advice that other doctors have blasted as inaccurate and unscientific.

He ran for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 as a “conservative outsider,” and was beaten by Democratic Sen. John Fetterman. The race was brutally personal at times as Fetterman recovered from a stroke and Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon, questioned Fetterman’s fitness for office.

Fetterman indicated he would vote for Oz if his former rival commits to protecting Medicare and Medicaid, a reporter from the online outlet NOTUS posted on X.

Trump, who knew Oz from a shared background in TV, endorsed him in a crowded GOP primary over Dave McCormick in 2022. McCormick won this year’s Pennsylvania Senate race against Sen. Bob Casey, the Associated Press declared earlier this month.

The election is in the midst of a recount because of the narrow margin, but if the result holds McCormick would be in a position, along with Fetterman, to cast a vote to support Oz.

Oz rose to fame with frequent medical segments as a health expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show before spinning off his own daytime series, The Dr Oz Show. He parlayed that into lucrative endorsement deals, frequent media appearances, and his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Oz went to Harvard University, where he played football and water polo, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical and business schools. He was born in Cleveland to Turkish immigrants and has dual citizenship in Turkey.

On the campaign trail in 2022, Oz stressed health care as a top concern, saying he would want to “refocus American health care on empowering patients and providing individualized treatments and therapies in a way that lowers costs both for families and the system overall.”

Trump implied Oz’s primary mandate would be to cut costs and work closely alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee for Health and Human Services, “to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”