Celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz spent years promoting the Affordable Care Act and advocating for expanded health care access until his run for U.S. Senate in 2022, when he called for the ACA to be replaced with privately run Medicare Advantage plans for which he was once a paid spokesperson.
Now as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz is expected to have a significant influence on shaping the future of health care. Nearly half of Americans — 160 million people — get their insurance through Medicare or Medicaid, and the programs touch all facets of the health care system, from doctors to hospitals to medical devices.
A NOTUS review of Oz’s health care comments spanning two decades shows that he long pushed for a universal health care system prior to the passage of the ACA, touting programs in Massachusetts as well as Switzerland, Germany and China as models for the U.S.
Oz repeatedly stated over a decade in the public eye that all Americans should have health care and that the government must be a part of providing health care access. In 2007, he told CNN that “there have been times when I have been tempted to break my Hippocratic oath, to put my patient first, because although I could save their life, they didn’t have the ability to reimburse whoever had to pay for it.”
“We can’t have people who have given their life to health care being pulled in two directions because one party says you can’t help that person,” Oz said.
In 2010, Oz was also an advocate with the California Endowment, encouraging people to enroll in coverage during the ACA’s first year. He called the ACA a “historic opportunity” to improve the U.S. health care system.
“The new health care law has so much in it to help Californians get better and more affordable health care,” Oz said.
“Forget the political brawls and epic website crashes,” he and longtime collaborator Michael Roizen wrote in 2013. “When we think about the Affordable Care Act, we’re excited about an amazing list of wellness benefits we bet you haven’t heard much about — and that we think could help America’s health (and yours) make a big YOU-turn for the better.”
As late as 2016, Oz was publicly supporting tenants of the ACA. At a time when Trump was campaigning for his first term on the promise of repealing Obamacare, Oz was calling the ACA “a very brave effort to include more Americans in the health care system” while criticizing it for not going far enough to address costs.
That changed when Oz ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022.
“Obamacare caused havoc on our health care system. It destabilized insurance markets while raising taxes & imposing harmful mandates on Pennsylvanians. I wouldn’t have voted for it,” Oz tweeted in May, a month after he narrowly won the Pennsylvania Senate GOP primary over Dave McCormick.
In his second term, Trump hasn’t committed to a particular health care agenda. It’s unclear if he will make a second push to repeal the ACA or try to cut Medicare. When asked about health care at the presidential debate in September, Trump said he “saved” the Affordable Care Act. When pressed on health care plans, Trump said he has the “concepts of a plan.” (The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.)
When announcing Oz as his nominee for CMS administrator last month, Trump said Oz would “cut waste and fraud in our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.”
“I have known Dr. Oz for many years, and I am confident he will fight to ensure everyone in America receives the best possible Healthcare, so our Country can be Great and Healthy Again!” Trump said in his statement.
But Oz has been clear about his own ideas. It was as a Senate candidate that Oz began a more concerted push toward “Medicare Advantage Plus.”
“Why not take advantage of this crisis and fix a long-term problem,” Oz said on “Fox & Friends” in June 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We should be in our golden age of health care delivery with high-quality, affordable care.”
His plan, which he also outlined in Forbes alongside former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson, pushed for privatizing traditional Medicare, which he called a “dysfunctional” system. Oz wanted to expand cheap Medicare Advantage to nonseniors and cover all Americans not on Medicaid with a new dedicated 20% payroll tax on all workers.
While the plans themselves are less expensive than traditional insurance, Medicare Advantage has been criticized by health policy experts for high rates of denial for care while at the same time overbilling the government for costs.
Analysis from the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) projects that insurers with Medicare Advantage will overcharge CMS $83 billion relative to Medicare in 2024 alone.
Medicare Advantage has also been criticized for misleading advertisements promising $0 supplemental premiums. And Oz himself was paid to boost Medicare Advantage plans.
As recently as two months before his nomination to CMS, the top of Oz’s YouTube page featured a video telling viewers “How to Get $0 a Month Medicare Coverage.”
“Which of these items can you get for $0? Can you get a cup of coffee for $0 or a pack of gum? How about a newspaper? Right? Not so easy,” Oz tells the crowd in a clip from his television show in 2019 (the video was uploaded in August 2024).
“With Medicare Advantage, you can get a plan with $0 monthly premium, which could mean lots more money in your piggy bank, which is the goal here,” he continued, bringing out Jalisa Jackson, who’s “here on behalf of my trusted sponsorship partner, medicareadvantage.com.”
Oz and Jackson took questions from the crowd, and then Oz closed out his pitch to the live studio audience: “I want to nudge you, I don’t want to shove you. Stop waiting on the sideline.”
A phone number flashed on the screen at the end of the segment: a “special phone number for Oz viewers who want to speak with a licensed insurance agent about Medicare Advantage.”
Besides the overt sponsorships in Medicare Advantage, financial disclosures from his Senate bid also showed Oz owned UnitedHealth Group stocks worth between $280,000 and $600,000. UnitedHealth is one of the nation’s three largest Medicare Advantage insurers.
His sponsorships and stocks showing a financial benefit from Medicare Advantage are drawing scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden led a letter to Oz last week, writing that “it is not clear that you are qualified for this critical job.”
They cited Oz’s “financial ties to private insurers, combined with your view that the traditional Medicare program is ‘highly dysfunctional’ and your advocacy for eliminating it entirely.”
“As CMS Administrator, you would be tasked with overseeing Medicare and ensuring that the tens of millions of seniors that rely on the program receive the care they deserve, including cracking down on abuses by private insurers in Medicare Advantage. The consequences of failure on your part would be grave. Billions of federal health care dollars — and millions of lives — are at stake,” the letter read.
Wyden told NOTUS he had not heard from Oz since sending the letter.
The main issue the lawmakers have with Medicare Advantage is the cost to taxpayers and the “deception” that encourages primarily older people to join.
“Many people go into Medicare Advantage because of the slick ads and find out when they need it most, it’s not available,” Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett told NOTUS.
“I don’t know whether Oz has an interest in it, as he did some of the natural substances he was promoting or not,” Doggett, who was the lone House member to sign the letter, added. “Maybe he believes in it as much as I believe it’s a mistake.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who authored a report in October on the issues seniors have faced in receiving care under Medicare Advantage, said that Oz hasn’t shown a commitment yet to improving Medicare Advantage, only to increasing its size.
“If Medicare Advantage is to continue, it has to be reformed to protect people who, right now, are often deceived into joining it,” Blumenthal said. “He has no real experience or affinity for a program that’s critical to health care for millions of Americans, nor is there any indication that he really wants to engage in the nuts and bolts, complex and challenging issues.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.