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If confirmed to be the next U.S. secretary of health and human services, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could be working “closely” with another official who’s infamous for his questionable health guidance: Dr. Mehmet Oz, who President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump said in a statement that if confirmed, Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency” — a plan that advocates for Medicare said would be carried out by privatizing the healthcare program that serves more than 66 million senior citizens.
As The Lever reported in 2022, Oz aggressively pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show, The Dr. Oz Show, airing one segment about the insurance agency MedicareAdvantage.com and urging viewers to sign up for the program via a hotline. Insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans are notorious for requiring “prior authorization” for doctors to provide certain medical procedures, subjecting patients to deceptive marketing, and harming senior citizens.
Considering his opposition to traditional Medicare, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project said Oz “is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending.”
The advocacy group Social Security Works noted that plans to “completely privatize Medicare” are also in Project 2025, the far-right policy agenda that Trump repeatedly tried to distance himself from while campaigning.
“Hands off our earned benefits!” said the group.
With Trump’s support, Oz unsuccessfully ran to represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate in 2022. The president-elect said Tuesday that if confirmed, Oz would work closely with Kennedy “to take on the illness industrial complex.”
Kennedy’s proposals for doing so include halting research on drug development, removing teeth-strengthening fluoride from drinking water, and firing Food and Drug Administration employees who have waged a “war on public health” through the “suppression” of the veterinary drug ivermectin and raw milk, which has been associated with disease outbreaks.
Oz has spent years peddling health advice, half of which University of Alberta researchers found to be “baseless or wrong” in a 2014 study published in the British Medical Journal. He promoted a study claiming coffee bean weight loss pills would “burn fat fast for anyone,” but the research was later retracted. Oz also claimed that eating certain foods like red onion and endive could reduce a person’s cancer risk by up to 75%, leading one paper published in the journal Nutrition and Cancer to assert, “Reality Check: There is no such thing as a miracle food.”
Oz has also maintained close ties to multi-level marketing companies that promote products like vitamins with false claims about their ability to treat, cure, or prevent diseases.
“Dr. Oz is unfit to run CMS,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown University. “He peddles conspiracy theories on vaccines and fake cures. He profits from fringe medical ideas.”
“By nominating RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz,” he added, “Trump is giving his middle finger to science. Having worked for 40 years in public health, it’s utterly disheartening.”
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