President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he can be Dr. Mehmet Oz – distinguished television host and former US Senate candidate – because the nominee Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator.
CMS operates or oversees programs that provide medical insurance to roughly half of Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, etc Children's medical insurance programand the Obamacare marketplace exchange Healthcare.gov.
These 4 programs account for $1.6 trillion in spending, or nearly 25% of total spending Federal budgetwhich Trump highlighted when he announced that Oz, a heart surgeon, was his alternative to steer CMS, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump said last week that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, to be HHS secretary.
Previously, Oz hosted The Dr. for greater than a dozen years. Oz Show,” a syndicated daytime television program. He was the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania in 2022, losing to Democrat Senator John Fetterman.
“America is facing a health crisis, and there may not be a doctor more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in an announcement on Tuesday.
“He is an outstanding physician, heart surgeon, inventor and world-class communicator who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades. Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to get to grips with the disease industrial complex and all the terrible chronic illnesses it has left in its wake.
“Our broken health care system is hurting Americans and straining our country’s budget,” Trump said.
“Dr. “Oz will play a leading role in advancing disease prevention so we get the best outcomes in the world for every dollar we spend on health care across our great country,” Trump said. “It will also reduce waste and fraud in our nation’s most expensive government agency, which accounts for a third of our nation’s health care spending and a quarter of our entire federal budget.”
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure is the present CMS administrator.
Oz has dual US and Turkish citizenshipas a toddler of Turkish immigrants. During his Senate campaign, he vowed to surrender his Turkish citizenship if elected.
Trump has been a vocal critic of Obamacare, because the Affordable Care Act is unofficially known, and tried – and failed – in his first yr within the White House to get Congress to repeal the law, which restricts the flexibility of many individuals to purchase individual health care , Grants provide insurance coverage.
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