Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump's pick to run Medicare, pushed unproven health cures

Prior to his announcement as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the nation’s top health insurance regulator, Dr. Mehmet Oz was known for pushing questionable medical treatments on his daytime talk show.

His claims about products that could help people lose weight without changing their eating or exercising habits were the subject of a 2014 Senate hearing. In 2015, 10 doctors wrote a letter to a leader of Columbia University saying Oz shouldn’t be on the faculty.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” they wrote, according to CBS News. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Oz is a trained heart surgeon with degrees from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Medical Center. He rose to fame as a regular guest on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," before hosting his own daytime talk show, "The Dr. Oz Show," from 2009 to 2022. He ended his show to run for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania as a Republican, losing to Democrat John Fetterman.

“He's an excellent surgeon,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “He started giving a lot of thoughtful advice, and then as the years went on, he delved into areas that were not scientifically based. He was promoting things that were not in consumers' best interests.”

Trump said he will nominate Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency that runs the two government-sponsored health insurance programs ? which together enroll more than 145 million Americans ? performs quality inspections of hospitals and nursing homes, and implements health care reform under the Affordable Care Act.

Liz Huston, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, said Oz “has championed the core values of Making America Healthy Again for decades.” She said he will be “an invaluable asset to the Trump-Vance administration, bringing expert leadership and unwavering commitment to real health care reform.”

An interview request submitted on Oz's website did not receive an immedate response.

Cohen criticized Oz for hosting a TV segment on a weight loss plan that included eating 500 calories a day — the average adult needs 2,000 calories — and taking supplements of a pregnancy hormone. "You will lose weight if you’re not eating food, so the (hormone) had nothing to do with it," he said.

He said Oz should have done a show outlining the problems with the approach, but instead brought in people who lost weight that way, making it seem like the hormone treatment led to weight loss.

A contentious Senate hearing

At the beginning of the 2014 Senate hearing, the panel played a clip of Oz saying, “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found a magic weight loss cure for every body type.” He was referring to a study on green coffee beans that the scientists later retracted, according to the New York Times.

Then-Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told Oz: "I don't get why you say this stuff because you know it's not true. So why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, why would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?"

Oz testified that he never sold supplements and looked into the camera at the end of every show to say so. He also said his segments were pulled out of context by scammers to sell their products, and he took responsibility for the “passionate language” he used to describe them.

“My show has tempered our editorial on promising supplements,” he said. “We have been more stringent in presenting opportunities and have included opposing voices on these segments.”

Senate Republicans are supportive

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is the government entity that runs the two insurance programs. The agency decides every year how much Medicare pays doctors and hospitals for which services, and private insurance companies often use those rates to determine their own coverage.

If confirmed, Oz could have the agency cover treatments that haven't been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration or that have limited evidence of benefit, according to Inside Health Policy.

"Dr. Oz will be a leader in incentivizing disease prevention, so we will get the best results in the world for every dollar we spend on health care in our great country," Trump said in his announcement. "He will also cut waste and fraud within our country's most expensive government agency, which is a third of our nation's health care spend, and a quarter of our entire national budget."

Some Democrats are taking shots at Oz's history.

“Dr. Oz is no stranger to peddling nonsense to innocent Americans without facing consequences,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement. “Americans deserve a leader at CMS who will stand up to Big Pharma and insurance fraudsters who are misleading seniors and denying them essential health care, and I’m not sure a talk show host is up for the fight."

But Republicans are widely supportive of Oz's nomination, which is all he will need to get confirmation in a Senate in which they will hold the majority. That includes moderate Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who told POLITICO, “It may well be helpful to have someone who has been a health care provider running that agency because they would have a whole different perspective."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's Medicare pick Dr. Oz pushed dubious treatments