Seventy-Five Organizations Call on Senators To Oppose Dr. Oz for CMS

In an effort led by Public Citizen, 75 organizations called on Congress to reject the nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz for Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

In the letter sent Thursday, the groups warned congressional leadership, “Dr. Oz has massive conflicts of interest, peddles unproven “cures” for personal profit, and represents an existential threat to the Medicare program. “We urge you to announce your opposition to Dr. Oz’s nomination as CMS Administrator.”

The letter cites various concerns about Oz’s fitness to run CMS:

• Dr. Oz owned significant shares in UnitedHealth Group, a major Medicare Advantage insurer, as well as in shares of CVS Health. Dr. Oz would seek to further privatize our healthcare system, including supercharging ongoing efforts to privatize Medicare, which would threaten access to care for seniors and people with disabilities.
  
• Privatized Medicare companies take the extra money they make from delaying and denying care to beneficiaries and siphon it into excessive executive compensation and share buybacks and dividends. Just last year, these companies cost Medicare an excess of around $82 billion. If this trend continues, we could be overpaying insurance companies by more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
  
• Dr. Oz previously publicly promoted unproven treatments for COVID-19 as well as supplements without sufficient evidence of their effectiveness. He also appears to have violated marketing disclosure requirements in promoting the supplement company, iHerb, on social media.
  
• The signatories concluded: “The head of CMS needs to be someone who has the best interest of the American people at heart, not his own self-interest and the wishes of insurers that seek to put corporate profits ahead of patients’ needs.”