Dr. Oz Celebrated Obamacare for Years Before He Was Against It

Oz, tapped by Trump to be CMS administrator, later pushed for an expansion of private Medicare Advantage plans — which he’d previously been paid to promote — as a Senate candidate.

Mehmet Oz, Donald Trump

As late as 2016, Oz was publicly supporting tenants of the ACA. Gene J. Puskar/AP

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.