Senate confirms Mehmet Oz to take lead of Medicare and Medicaid agency

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former bosom surgeon and TV pitchman Dr. Mehmet Oz was confirmed Thursday to pb the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Oz became the agency's head successful a enactment enactment 53-45 vote.

The 64-year-old volition negociate wellness security programs for astir fractional the country, with oversight of Medicare, Medicaid oregon Affordable Care Act coverage. He steps into the caller relation arsenic Congress is debating cuts to the Medicaid program, which provides sum to millions of mediocre and disabled Americans.

Oz has not said yet whether helium would reason specified cuts to the government-funded program, alternatively offering a imaginativeness of promoting healthier lifestyles, integrating artificial quality and telehealth into the system, and rethinking agrarian wellness attraction delivery.

During a proceeding past month, helium told senators that helium did favour enactment requirements for Medicaid recipients, but paperwork shouldn’t beryllium utilized to reaffirm that they are moving oregon to artifact radical from staying enrolled.

Oz, who worked for years a respected bosom surgeon astatine Columbia University, besides noted that doctors dislike Medicaid for its comparatively debased payments and immoderate don’t privation to instrumentality those patients.

He said that erstwhile Medicaid eligibility was expanded without improving resources for doctors, that made attraction options adjacent thinner for the program’s halfway patients, which see children, large women and radical with disabilities.

“We person to marque immoderate important decisions to amended the prime of care,” helium said.

Oz has formed a adjacent narration with his caller boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's hosted the wellness caput and his interior ellipse regularly astatine his location successful Florida. He's leaned into Kennedy's run to “Make America Healthy Again," an effort to redesign the nation’s nutrient supply, cull vaccine mandates and formed uncertainty connected immoderate long-established technological research.

The erstwhile TV amusement big talks often astir the value of a steadfast diet, aligning intimately with Kennedy's views.

While has has faced immoderate disapproval for promoting unproven vitamin supplements and holistic treatments — staples of the “MAHA movement" — he's regularly encouraged Americans to get vaccinated.

Oz volition instrumentality implicit CMS days aft the bureau was spared from the benignant of heavy cuts that Kennedy ordered astatine different nationalist wellness agencies. Thousands of staffers astatine the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, arsenic good arsenic the National Institutes for Health are retired of a occupation aft wide layoffs that started Tuesday.

CMS is expected to suffer astir 300 staffers, including those who worked connected number wellness and to shrink the outgo of wellness attraction delivery.