President-elect Donald Trump has nominated heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid , the massive government programs providing health care to 150 million Americans. What could that mean if you’re on Medicare or will enroll in coming years? While no one knows for sure, and Oz would need Senate confirmation to become the 19 th Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), it’s possible to read the tea leaves based on what we’ve heard from him, Trump, and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr .—Oz’s boss if confirmed by the Senate to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump and Oz have been friends for 20 years and Oz served on Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition in his first term.
In a statement nominating America’s most famous TV doctor talk-show host to work with Kennedy and “take on the illness industrial complex,” Trump wrote: “There may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again.” But, STAT News reporter Lev Facher told PBS, Kennedy and Oz “are about as outside the mainstream as you could conceive of for picks to run the Health department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
” Speaking at the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) conference in Seattle last week before Trump selected Oz, Andrew MacPherson, managing partner of the nonpartisan health care consulting firm Healthsperien, said: “With the Trump administration, federal health i.