Trump picks TV host Dr Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid

Donald Trump has named Mehmet Oz, a doctor and former television host, to run the powerful agency that oversees the healthcare of millions of Americans.

“There may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again, ” Trump said in a statement announcing his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Oz trained as a surgeon before finding fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s, later hosting his own TV programme.

He has been criticised by experts for promoting what they called was bad health advice about weight loss drugs and “miracle” cures, and suggesting malaria drugs as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic.

The Trump transition team said in a statement that Oz “will work closely with [Health Secretary nominee] Robert F Kennedy Jr to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake”.

Oz will need to be confirmed by the Senate next year before he officially takes charge of the agency.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversee the country’s largest healthcare programs, providing coverage to more than 150 million Americans. The agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for medical services.

In 2023, the US government spent more than $1.4 trillion on Medicaid and Medicare combined, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Trump said in a statement that Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency”, and the Republican Party platform pledged to increase transparency, choice and competition and expand access to healthcare and prescription drugs.

Oz, 64, trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon – specialising in operations on the heart and lungs – and worked at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University.

After he appeared in dozens of Oprah segments, he started The Dr Oz Show, where he doled out health advice to viewers.

But the line between promotion and science on the show was not always clear, and Oz has recommended homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics have called “pseudoscience”.

He was criticised during Senate hearings in 2014 for endorsing unproven pills that he said would “literally flush fat from your system” and “push fat from your belly”.

During those hearings Oz said he never sold any specific dietary supplements on his show. But he has publicly endorsed products off air and his financial ties to health care companies were revealed in fillings made during his 2022 run for the US Senate in Pennsylvania.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz promoted the anti-malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which experts say are ineffective against the virus.