What to Know About Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s Pick to Lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

On March 14, Dr. Mehmet Oz will answer questions from members of the Senate Finance Committee in his confirmation hearing to lead the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Oz is an unusual combination of a high-achieving doctor—he has an Ivy-League pedigree and was a heart surgeon at Columbia University for decades—and a TV personality who hosted a daytime talk show for 13 seasons. He’s also courted controversy over endorsements of what many experts view as questionable products and remedies. It’s not the typical background for a head of CMS, which generally includes a heavy focus on health policy.

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Here’s what to know about Oz and his position on everything from Medicare to supplements during his years in the public eye.

Oz’s medical background

Oz was on the faculty of Columbia University, earning some renown as a skilled heart transplant surgeon who was part of the first published study, in 2001, reporting on the benefits of mechanical hearts in treating heart failure. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed an MBA. He went to Columbia for his medical residency and remained to join the faculty, where he spent the rest of his medical career.

Oz earned notoriety for his then-unorthodox views on medical treatment, such as allowing his patients to receive massage and spiritual interventions to help their recovery. His untraditional views attracted the attention of health journalists eager to hear more about the quick-talking, engaging surgeon who wasn’t afraid of discussing such unprecedented strategies.

His fame-making Oprah appearance

Unlike many academics, Oz felt comfortable in the spotlight and seemed to have a knack for distilling complicated medical jargon and ideas into language that was easy for people without medical expertise to understand.

He gained fame, for example, as a guest on Oprah in 2014 when he spoke about bowel movements. “It should sound like a diver from Acapulco hits the water,” he told a skeptical Oprah about how feces should land in the toilet. He also informed viewers that their stool should be shaped like the letter “S.”

In following episodes, he brought the same straight-talk to educating people about keeping their hearts healthy, bringing cadaver hearts to shock people into seeing the differences between hearts damaged by smoking and healthy ones.

The Dr. Oz Show: Celebrity and controversy

The popularity of his appearances led Oprah to support his own talk show focused on health issues, which ran from 2009 to 2022. Oz built on his medical knowledge and engaging way of communicating to discuss everything from how to keep hearts healthy to good nutrition and trendy supplements. His unique ability to tackle embarrassing health topics even led to a parody on Saturday Night Live in 2011.

His quick transition from the operating room to the TV studio didn’t surprise his long-time collaborator, Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer at Cleveland Clinic, with whom Oz wrote a series of best-selling health books. The pair also write a regular column that is syndicated in dozens of newspapers that Oz will give up if he’s confirmed. “He was just outstanding,” Roizen says of Oz’s early Oprah appearances.

But once he became a TV personality, controversy began to creep in. Tasked with filling an hour a day, five days a week, with a focus on entertaining people to maintain ratings, Oz’s show began touting products and health remedies for which they had received endorsement fees, according to an investigation by the New York Times. His practices prompted the BMJ to publish an analysis of 40 shows and conclude that fewer than half of the health advice touted by Oz was supported by scientific evidence.

The criticism in part prompted a Senate committee on consumer protection to call a hearing on false advertising by diet and weight-loss companies in 2014, and included testimony from Oz about weight-loss products he discussed on the show. Sen. Claire McCaskill chastised him for the so-called “Oz effect,” referring to his popularity and ability to convince people to trust his advice and purchase whatever products he recommended, even if the evidence was lacking. “I don’t get why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, why would you cheapen your show?” she said.

Oz admitted that he often discussed “alternative solutions” that are “controversial,” but said he would prefer open conversations about them on his show than in “back alleys.”

“I actually do personally believe in the items that I talk about in the show,” he said. “I passionately study them, and I recognize that oftentimes, they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact. But nevertheless I would give my audience the advice I give my family all the time, and I’ve given my family these products.”

Former members of his show recently told STAT that they were sometimes asked to translate findings from animal studies and apply them to people, leading people to think that the evidence behind a product was more robust than it was.

Last December, the watchdog group Public Citizen wrote a letter to the FTC asking the agency to investigate whether Oz violated advertising policies requiring people who are paid to endorse products to reveal that financial relationship to the public. Oz has posted on his social media accounts about iHerb, a company that makes supplements, and while his biography notes that he is a “global advisor & stakeholder” in the company, he does not disclose this relationship in each mention of its products, as required by the FTC.

Doctors have also questioned the increasingly blurry line between Oz’s medical advice and endorsements. In 2015, a group of 10 doctors from across the country wrote to the dean of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia, asking that Oz be fired because he “repeatedly show[ed] disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine,” and “manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.” Oz remains on the faculty as a professor emeritus.

In a recent filing to the Office of Government Ethics, Oz committed to divesting his interests in health care companies if he is confirmed to head CMS.

Oz’s political ambitions

On his show, Oz regularly promoted Medicare Advantage, a plan supported by President Trump and Congressional Republicans that allows seniors to choose between government-funded Medicare coverage or buying their own private coverage. During his failed 2022 bid as the Republican candidate for Senator in Pennsylvania, Oz campaigned to add a 20% payroll tax in order to expand Medicare Advantage plans in the state and outlined his proposal in an op-ed in Forbes. Oz and his wife, Lisa, have owned stock in insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare, that would profit from such an expansion.

If confirmed as head of CMS, Oz would run the government agency responsible for setting reimbursement rates for health services from prescription drugs to gene therapies, and overseeing the Affordable Care Act, which expands accessibility to affordable health insurance. Medicare covers health costs for about 20% of Americans who are 65 or older, and Medicaid insures another 20% who meet low income, age, or disability criteria. Often, decisions made by CMS to cover services are mirrored by private insurers, which cover about 65% of Americans, mostly through plans provided their employers.

Many have pointed out Oz’s history of potential conflicts of interest and questionable endorsements. Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer-advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen and the author of the group’s letter to the FTC, said in a statement in Dec. 2024 that the position of CMS head is one of “trust, which among other things, requires protecting taxpayers from fraudsters and scammers. If Dr. Oz is careless about fair advertising rules himself, can we expect him to crack down on those who would bilk Medicare?”

Oz’s connection to Trump

During Trump’s first presidential campaign in Sept. 2016, Trump appeared on the Dr. Oz Show and showed Oz his results from recent health tests. “If a patient of mine had these records, I’d be really happy, and I’d send them on their way,” Oz said. On the Today Show afterward, Oz went further: “The records I got indicate that he is healthy enough to be president,” he said.

Toward the end of his term, Trump appointed Oz to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, which helps the White House support healthy diets and physical activity.

Several years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was campaigning for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Oz advocated for hydroxychloroquine, the malaria treatment that Trump controversially supported to treat COVID-19. While small, early studies suggested it might be beneficial, and physicians started prescribing it, ultimately data showed that hydroxychloroquine does not help COVID-19 patients.

What to expect from the hearing

Senators will likely quiz Oz on some of the inconsistent positions he has taken, including on the energy extracting process known as fracking.

In 2015, he and Roizen wrote a column raising concerns about the health effects of fracking, including the risk of birth defects, and called for more studies on its impact on human health. However, when Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania—one the country’s major coal and natural gas producers—he appeared to support fracking, posting on Twitter in 2022, “Back off Biden and give us the freedom to Frack!”

Oz and Roizen also advocated for warning people about glyphosate, an herbicide used on crops like grains and corn, on labels of foods that might have been exposed to the chemical. “He strongly supported that,” says Roizen. “And said people should know about this.” (Roizen adds that he supports Oz to lead CMS: “He is the best person I could think of for this job.”)

Oz will also likely face questions about his previous support of Medicare Advantage. If confirmed, Oz could take steps toward implementing those plans.