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mehmet oz
Dr. Oz Nomination Seen as Potential Boon for Medicare Privatization
"Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare," warned one advocacy group. "That’s why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare."
Nov 20, 2024
Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose unsuccessful 2022 Pennsylvania Senate bid included pitching voters on a plan to expand the privatized Medicare Advantage program, is now in a position to potentially actualize that plan.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Oz, also known by his TV personality name Dr. Oz, is his pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
"Dr. Oz—a massive investor in Pharma—told the voters of Pennsylvania his plans to privatize Medicare… and they rejected him. Now Trump is giving him the authority to see his industry-approved plan carried through," wrote the progressive-leaning outlet The Lever, which covered Oz's support for Medicare Advantage back in 2022.
Through Medicare Advantage, which has been promoted by Trump and other congressional Republicans, seniors can opt out of traditional government-run Medicare health plans and instead choose plans administered by private insurers, such as UnitedHealthcare and Cigna.
According to The Lever's 2022 reporting, Oz pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show The Dr. Oz Show and co-wrote a 2020 column for Forbes with a former healthcare executive in which they argued that a "Medicare Advantage For All" plan can "save" our healthcare system. In the column, Oz and his co-author articulated a plan to expand Medicare Advantage by imposing a 20% payroll tax.
Oz "is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending," wrote Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project on X, in reference to The Lever's investigation.
The Lever also reported that Oz's plan to expand private plans under Medicare Advantage could "boost companies in which he invests." For example, Oz and his wife owned up to $550,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth Group, at the time of reporting. UnitedHealthcare and Humana account for nearly half, or 47%, of Medicare Advantage enrollees nationwide, according to the health policy organization KFF.
Additionally, a 2022 investigation by The New York Timesfound that major health insurers have exploited Medicare Advantage to boost their profits by billions of dollars.
Project 2025, a list of right-wing policy proposals led by the Heritage Foundation that Trump has tried to distance himself from, calls for making Medicare Advantage the default option for Medicare beneficiaries, which, if enacted, "would be a multibillion-dollar annual giveaway to corporations at the expense of Medicare enrollees and taxpayers," according to the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, offered a related critique of Oz: Americans "need someone who will crack down on insurers who want to deny care to the sick, providers who skimp on quality healthcare, corporations that want to privatize Medicare, and Big Pharma profiteers and ideologues who want to slash Medicaid and refuse care to low-income people. What they do not need is a healthcare huckster, which unfortunately Dr. Mehmet Oz appears to have become, having spent much of his recent career hawking products of dubious medical value."
In addition to the potential boon for private insurers, some researchers, news outlets, and members of Congress have also raised concerns about the quality of care administered under Medicare Advantage.
A 2022 government report found that "[Medicare Advantage Organizations] sometimes delayed or denied Medicare Advantage beneficiaries' access to services, even though the requests met Medicare coverage rules" and also "denied payments to providers for some services that met both Medicare coverage rules and [Medicare Advantage Organization] billing rules."
In October, a group of three Democratic lawmakers wrote to the current CMS administrator about increasingly widespread abuses and care denials by for-profit Medicare Advantage insurers.
"We are concerned that in many instances MA plans are failing to deliver, compromising timely access to care, and undermining the ability of seniors and Americans with disabilities to purchase the coverage that’s right for them," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), and Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) wrote in a letter.
"We continue to hear alarming reports from seniors and their families, beneficiary advocates, and healthcare providers that MA plans are falling short, and finding a good plan is too difficult," they wrote.
In particular, they pointed to Medicare Advantage plans' growing reliance on prior authorization, a complex, barrier-ridden process whereby doctors must demonstrate a proposed treatment is medically necessary before the insurer will cover it.
"Overuse of prior authorization is not only harmful to patients, it hinders healthcare providers' ability to offer best-in-class service," they added.
Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, warned in a social media post Tuesday that "Dr. Oz wants to fully privatize Medicare."
"That's why Donald Trump put him in charge of Medicare," the group added. "We will fight to stop this charlatan from getting anywhere near our Medicare system."
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'Unfit': Trump Nominates Dr. Oz to Run Medicare
"By nominating RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz," said one public health expert, "Trump is giving his middle finger to science."
Nov 19, 2024
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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The Rise of Celebrity-Politicians Is Bad for Democracy
The direct line between celebrity and political ascendance is altering the conventional dynamics of political power in anti-democratic ways.
Nov 12, 2022
In a matter of days Americans will vote on a new cohort of U.S. Senators in a midterm election cycle with significant bearing on the nation's future. Among those vying for what is actually a tedious, bureaucratic "sausage-making" job, is a crop of celebrity-politicians whose electoral success, along with that of Donald Trump's, is signaling what could be a fundamental change in the way political power works in America.
In Georgia, the state's first Black U.S. Senator, a respected pastor, is being challenged by a football star who claims that Darwin's theory of evolution is a hoax. If humans evolved from apes, he has opined, why are there still apes? Running for Ohio's seat is a bestselling author and conservative personality who's suggested that victims of domestic violence should just suck it up in the name of preserving the sanctity of "the family." In Pennsylvania, one of the nominees is celebrity doctor, Dr. Mehmet Oz, known to peddle unproven health products on his Emmy-winning TV show and prescribe psychic mediums, relaying messages from the dead, to aid grieving families.
Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, the culture industry seemed content to play a supporting role in our politics. Celebrities surrogated for candidates, and reproduced social hierarchies through their conspicuous consumption and the characters they played. A notable exception, Dr. Oz's mentor Oprah Winfrey helped to infuse "rugged individualism" into America's cultural common sense, using her top-rated TV show to explain away the cruelties of Reaganism--and subsequent administrations' bipartisan attacks on poor and working-class people--as consequences of personal failure and individual pathology, putting a therapeutic face on their brutal executions of state power.
On the flipside, politicians have long been content to just dabble in the world of show business: Eisenhower appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, JFK went on late-night TV, Clinton donned shades while playing sax on Arsenio Hall, Obama slow-jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon. Today, however, the direct line between celebrity and political ascendance is altering the conventional dynamics of political power in anti-democratic ways. JFK and Obama may have used pop culture to achieve political ends, but they still employed legal-rational means, and the tools of bureaucratic administration, to govern. Trump, conversely, was a purely charismatic leader who exploited the tools of government to expand his celebrity, exercising a distinctly anti-institutional form of authority that derived its legitimacy not from laws and reason, but from loyalty and emotion.
According to classical sociologist Max Weber, charismatic leaders tend to gain traction when rational forms of government and institutions fail, when people lose faith in the establishment and desire escape from the dehumanizing and alienating effects of bureaucratic life. Unlike kings who draw power from legacy and tradition, or heads of state whose authority is vested in their role in the legal-rational order, a charismatic leader's power is rooted in his or her followers' beliefs and yearnings for transcendence.
Recent history bears this out. A few years before Trump was elected, pollster Patrick Caddell conducted a study of Republicans' waning popularity and found an extraordinarily high level of discontent among voters and desires for "an outsider" to fix Washington. Similar trends could be seen in Europe, Turkey, the Philippines, and now Italy and elsewhere: reactionism was on the rise as quality of life and access to basic needs were on the decline and the contradictions of "free market" capitalism deepening. The rise of the antiestablishment celebrity-politician is a consequence of this decline--and of the gaping contradiction between political elites' rhetoric about safeguarding freedom and democracy, and the unfreedoms and powerlessness that most people face.
Trump exploited these dynamics, playing up his celebrity and outsider status and appealing to Americans' distrust of the establishment and desires to be entertained. The many who have tried to delegitimize his power on rational grounds--citing his grifting, nonsensical claims, embellishing of wins, and distracting from failures--have ultimately failed, perhaps because his mass of supporters hold him to a different set of standards based on how they came to know him. After all, reality TV audiences know the shows are staged, and that cast members are performing images of their authentic selves, but they tune in faithfully and take pleasure in it anyway.
In this regard, the phenomenon of Trump and the celebrity-politician may be exposing some inconvenient truths about elite power and the culture industries operating on its behalf. Among them is the prospect that masses of people may be choosing emotional stimulation and entertainment over strivings for actual democratic power. Or worse, that they prefer the corruption they have come to expect to be at the hands of charlatan-entertainers rather than run through the regular, bureaucratic channels of technocratic political elites.
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