The Republican-controlled US Senate confirmed celebrity doctor and former TV host Mehmet Oz by 53 votes to 45 to head the institution that oversees the country’s healthcare programmes for millions of Americans, on Friday, the 4th of April, reports the BBC.
Oz, who has never held public office, was picked by President Donald Trump last year to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The 64-year-old, whose approach to medicine has been criticised, trained as a surgeon before rising to fame on Oprah Winfrey’s show in the early 2000s.
Health experts have previously criticised Oz for promoting what they consider poor health advice on weight loss drugs and “miracle cures”, and for recommending the use of malaria drugs to treat Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic.
AFTER TRUMP CHOSE OZ TO LEAD THE CMS, HE SAID IN A STATEMENT THAT “THERE IS PROBABLY NO DOCTOR MORE QUALIFIED AND CAPABLE… TO MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN”.
Before his inauguration, Trump’s transition team announced that Oz would “work closely” with US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “take on the illness industrial complex”.
CMS oversees the country’s largest healthcare programmes, which provide healthcare to about half of Americans.
It regulates health insurance and sets the prices paid to doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies for medical services.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2023 the US government spent a total of more than 1.4 billion US dollars on CMS.
Oz also hosted The Dr. Oz Show from 2009 to 2022, where he gave health advice to viewers. But he was criticised for recommending homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics call “pseudoscience”.
Democrats have previously claimed that an examination of his financial documents shows that Oz allegedly failed to pay 403 739 US dollars in medical taxes on more than 10 million US dollars in income from his media company between 2021 and 2023.
But a spokesman for Oz said a review by the Office of Government Ethics showed he had complied with the law.