In rapid succession, Donald Trump is filling his Cabinet with former television personalities.
Following Monday’s announcement that Trump is looking towards former Fox host and MTV star Sean Duffy to take on the position of secretary of the Department of Transportation, news broke on Tuesday evening that he’s eyeing celebrity physician Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
In a statement announcing Dr. Oz as his choice for CMS lead, he said the Dr. will “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”
Cheerleading his own decision, Trump made room to highlight that Oz “won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices.”
As CNBC points out in their coverage of the highly important role Oz could potentially step into: CMS operates or oversees health-care programs that provide coverage to about 1 out of every 2 Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Obamacare marketplace exchange Healthcare.gov.
“America is facing a healthcare crisis, and there may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement. “He is an eminent physician, heart surgeon, inventor, and world-class communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades. Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans and crushes our country’s budget. Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing disease prevention, so we get the best results in the world for every dollar we spend on healthcare in our great country. He will also cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency, which is a third of our nation’s healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire national budget.”
As The New York Times highlights, Oz does not have experience running a large federal bureaucracy. But he has weighed in on Medicare policy in the past, coauthoring a 2020 opinion column in Forbes arguing for a universal health coverage system, in which every American not covered by Medicaid would be enrolled in a private Medicare Advantage plan.
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