President-elect Donald Trump today said Dr. Mehmet Oz will be his nominee for the post of administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
CMS is the arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that oversees Medicare. CMS also works with the Internal Revenue Service and the Employee Benefits Security Administration to regulate commercial health insurance.
If Oz is confirmed by the Senate to be CMS administrator, he could play a role in everything from writing Medicare Advantage plan marketing rules to determining whether HealthCare.gov continues to operate and how it advertises any services it continues to offer.
Trump, who previously named Robert Kennedy Jr. to be his HHS secretary nominee, announced the Oz pick in a post on Truth Social.
“Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in the post. “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.”
Mehmet Oz: Oz was born in Cleveland in 1960. His father was a heart surgeon and medical professor.
Oz earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a medical degree and a master’s degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania.
