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WASHINGTON — Mehmet Oz is a step closer to being confirmed as the next head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, after the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday advanced his nomination.
The Senate Finance Committee voted 14 -13 along party lines to advance Oz’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote.
If confirmed, the 64-year-old would oversee the nearly $1.5 trillion the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicade — health insurance programs that make up a large amount of the budget and have often been wielded as political cudgels.
He has name recognition as the host of "The Dr. Oz Show," and previously worked as a professor of cardiac surgery at Columbia University. After the show stopped taping in 2022, Oz ran for the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, where he was defeated by now-Sen. John Fetterman.
“Dr. Oz’s years of experience as an acclaimed physician and public health advocate have prepared him well to manage the intricacies of CMS,” Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, said in a statement.
But Democrats on the committee roundly panned the nomination, pointing toward the looming threat of cuts to Medicaid. Oz largely dodged questions about whether he would support reducing funding to the safety-net insurance program during a confirmation hearing earlier this month.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the lead Democrat on the committee, argued ahead of the vote that given the chance to "assure the American people that he would not be a a rubber stamp for Republican plans to gut Medicaid and hike Affordable Care Act premiums" during Oz's confirmation hearing, "at every turn he failed the test." Wyden encouraged his colleagues to oppose the nomination, claiming that Oz has shown no ability or interest in "pushing back on the dangerous Trump health care agenda."
