A former heart surgeon and fame doctor has been selected to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) – the healthcare service for millions of underprivileged Americans.
Mehmet Oz, 64, was confirmed for the post by the Republican controlled Senate as part of a shaking of the healthcare system. He will manage health insurance programs for about half the country, oversees over the coverage of Medicare, Medicaid or affordable care.
His appointment comes because the Trump administration is considering making cuts to the Medicaid program, which covers millions of poor and disabled Americans.
Oz, told Senators in March that he had preferred the job requirements for Medicaid recipients, but said paperwork was not essential to re -confirming the workers’ status or preventing people from staying enrolled.
“We need to make some important decisions to improve the quality of care,” he said at the time.
Oz has grown into a significant fame by hosting the Dr OZ show, and sometimes presenting controversial health advice to viewers from 2009 to 2022. This included that malaria medicine was an effective healing for Covid-19 at the beginning of the pandemic.
The Colombia University Heart Surgeon also praised the recent surge in weight loss medicine such as Ozempic and Wegovy to combat obesity in America to the dismay of his nearest critic and new boss Robert F Kennedy Jr..
Despite promoting a close relationship with the new secretary of healthcare, they disagree with the use of weight loss medicine, and Kennedy Jr. Retain its own catalog of distrust in healthcare.
He regularly presented the health secretary and his inner circle at his home in Florida. And he leaned in Kennedy’s campaign to “heal America again”, an attempt to redesign the country’s food supply, reject vaccine mandates, and doubt a long -established scientific research.
Oz still has to declare whether he is opposed to speculated cuts to the government funded by the government.
Tuesday, thousands of staff members at the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes for Health were discharged.
The CMS is expected to lose about 300 staff members in the wake of this week’s cuts.
The independent contacted the US Department of Health and Human Services for comment.
