The Great and All Powerful Oz Goes to Washington
"America's doctor" thinks health is our patriotic duty, and is poised to run Medicaid. Here's why that's a disaster waiting to happen.
Friday essays are usually paywalled but I’m keeping this one free to read because we need to be talking much more about what the Trump administration is doing to federal health policy. I’m also hoping it will inspire you to call your reps! 5Calls makes it so easy and has a great script for opposing the confirmation of Dr. Oz. So please, heart and share this piece widely so it reaches as many folks as possible.
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Last week, Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared before the Senate Finance Committee, the first step in his quest to be confirmed as the next administrator for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government agency that oversees healthcare coverage for half of all Americans with health insurance — a group that includes 65 million senior citizens and almost 80 million low-income adults, children, pregnant people and/or disabled Americans.
Dr. Oz is a heart surgeon, a television celebrity and a brand.
He has never worked in government or public health. He has little administrative experience. Let’s compare that bio to Robert A. Derzon, the first person to oversee both Medicare and Medicaid in 1977. Before taking this position, Derzon was the first deputy commissioner of hospitals for New York City and director of the University of California’s hospitals and clinics; he was also a lifelong proponent of universal healthcare.
Or consider Donald Berwick, MD, who held the job from 2010 to 2011, after launching a nonprofit called the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. In 2005 he was knighted by the Queen of England for making British healthcare more efficient.
And Oz’s most recent predecessor is a woman of color named Chiquita W. Brooks-LaSure. Brooks-LaSure began her career as lead Medicaid analyst in the Office of Management and Budget before later joining the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, where she managed policy related to the Affordable Care Act.
Even if I didn’t disagree with 80 percent of what he believes about health, by these measures, Mehmet Oz, MD is not remotely qualified for this tremendously important and complicated position.
Alas, lack of basic job qualifications are the least of our issues. Dr. Oz has been exploiting his audience—which disproportionately includes women and seniors—for profit, for decades. In his hearing last week, Oz told the Senate Finance Committee: “It is our patriotic duty to be healthy. It costs a lot of money to take care of sick people who are sick because of lifestyle choices.” This is a blatantly fatphobic and ableist approach to health, as we’ll discuss.
And it’s entirely on brand for Dr. Oz, a wizard with a God complex.
America first met Dr. Oz thanks to Oprah. She guest starred on his first TV show (a limited run on The Discovery Channel called Second Opinion with Dr. Oz) in 2003, and then brought him on her own show some 62 times between 2006 and 2011, according to Newsweek. Oprah dubbed Oz “America’s doctor” and had him consult on all sorts of matters—heart health, what your poop should look like, and of course, weight loss. (But! She didn’t endorse him when he ran for the Senate in 2022.) His appearances on Oprah led to Oz’s own talk show, which ran from 2009 to 2022. By 2013, The Dr. Oz Show was one of the most highly rated daily television shows in the country; it ultimately won ten Daytime Emmys. During the show’s run, Oz also published several books and launched a magazine called Dr Oz THE GOOD LIFE, which I freelanced for a few times.
I dug through my files to remember what I wrote for THE GOOD LIFE. One story was about how to bond as a family in your backyard, and involved building a fire pit and developing your own “Oz Olympics” style family workout challenge. (Look, I had only just had my first kid, so I couldn’t fully grasp what a dumb idea this was! But yes, in my heart, I knew.) Another was about how the lighting in your house can improve your health. I can say with certainty that the science underpinning both pieces was sparse at best. And this is the major recurring theme of Dr. Oz’s career as a health content creator and provider.
There have already been several excellent deep dives into Dr Oz’s dubious claims and the misinformation spread by his show, books and magazine during these years. So rather than rehash it all here, I’ll direct you to this excellent episode of Maintenance Phase, this 2014 LA Times story which asked other doctors to fact-check his work, and last week’s New York Times piece doing the same.
But let’s review a few highlights:
Dr. Oz has promoted dozens of weight loss supplements and strategies over the years, including but not limited to pine nuts, apple cider vinegar, ‘teatoxing,’ raspberry ketones, colloidal siver, and supplements containing green coffee bean extract, which spawned a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit. Concluded the New York Times health reporters: “There is not substantial evidence that these items lead to weight loss.”
The Dr Oz Show made an average of 12 recommendations per episode, but “believable or somewhat believable evidence” could be found for only 33 percent of those recommendations when University of Alberta researchers analyzed the show’s claims for a 2014 article in the British Medical Journal. 15 percent of Dr. Oz’s recommendations directly contradicted scientific evidence, the same researchers found.
In 2014, Dr. Oz testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance during a hearing on false advertising in the diet and weight-loss industry. Though he painted himself as a victim of “unscrupulous advertisers’ vicious attempts to twist his words to sell diet pills,” the committee responded by dissecting the many and varied pseudoscientific health claims he had made on his show. “The scientific community is almost monolithic against you,” Senator Claire McCaskill told him.
Dr. Oz’s preference for showmanship over science appears to predate his national celebrity. In 1994, already renowned as a heart surgeon, Oz launched the Cardiac Complementary Care Center at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York. The goal was to study alternative medicine protocols like reiki, yoga, and hypnosis to see which improved healing and health outcomes for cardiac patients.
In a 2015 Vox investigation, Oz’s former colleagues explained how his priorities skewed their ability to conduct effective research and provide patient care:
[The center’s co-founder, certified perfusionist and registered nurse, Jery] Whitworth said he told Oz often, “We are in our infancy. We haven’t proven anything. Before you’re going out there to major media, we need to look at what we’re doing here. Stop the media circus.”
Monique Class, a family nurse practitioner and another former employee of the center, said the media attention negatively affected their work. “It became about Oz. Not about the project. Not about the patients. Not about the work. That all became secondary to his rise to the top.”
It wasn’t uncommon, Class said, for Oz to say some version of the following to her or to the other employees: “Give me a patient because the cameras are coming in, and tell me what I need to know.”
Class said, “He was always acting. He didn't know this patient. He was not connected to this patient. We'd give him a two- or three-minute sound byte and he’d sit there in front of the cameras like he'd done this work and had this deep connection.”
Out of frustration with how things were being run, Whitworth said he shuttered the center in 2000. That same year, Oz reopened it under another name.
Given all of this, it is perhaps not remotely surprising that Oz has aligned himself with Trump, another former TV celebrity who cares much more about fame than facts. During the 2016 Presidential race, Oz interviewed Trump on his show, praised his testosterone levels, claimed to have reviewed Trump’s health records and declared him “healthy enough to be president” even though the entire interaction was pretty clearly manufactured for TV. It was a shrewd move; Trump was delighted to endorse Oz’s Senate run a few years later.
Prior to that campaign, Oz had supported Obamacare and abortion rights. But he walked back both of those positions during his race, and has continued to move to the right ever since.
Olivia Nuzzi wrote for New York in 2021 that Dr. Oz’s newfound conservatism, particularly on abortion, is actually his wife’s position. This makes sense because Lisa Oz has been shaping her husband’s brand, public persona and career trajectory for most of the almost 40 years they’ve been married. In a 2010 profile for the New York Times, Frank Bruni wrote: “Mehmet and Lisa Oz’s union is part business partnership—she has pitched in on his books and TV projects and usually sits in on his radio show to interview the guests with him—and all mutual-admiration society.”
Lisa is nowhere near as famous as her husband. But she has published her own self-help and cookbooks under his brand, which is really their brand and something Lisa is deeply protective of, as Nuzzi reported: “‘I feel like I haven’t had a career at all. I’m a professional dilettante,’ [Lisa] once said. ‘My favorite thing to do is hang out with my husband … but I couldn’t do surgery with him, and what he loves to do is work. So we devised a way to work together.’”
A big part of Lisa’s work has been upholding Oz’s image as the Platonic ideal of health.
Her Instagram, which reads a bit like a fan account, is littered with pictures of Dr. Oz hiking, picking watermelon, and doing aerial yoga. He’s often shirtless on a beach or posed in formalwear (he’s a fan of no tie, white shirt, with the top two unbuttoned). Dr. Oz is not just healthy, he’s sexy about it.
In a 2015 appearance on The Dr. Oz Show to promote Lisa’s cookbook The Oz Family Kitchen, the couple flirts while she makes a complicated vegan Mexican-ish casserole. They reminisce about how Mehmet made Lisa, a longtime vegetarian, chicken wrapped in aluminum foil on their first date. “That was the first and last meal you ever cooked!” she laughed. “I don’t know if he didn’t know what a vegetarian was, I just think he wasn’t listening when I said vegetarian. It’s that male condition where the ears don’t work when you talk.” Then she tries to get back to cooking while Oz begins poking her stomach, while she makes a vegan cornbread crust for the casserole. “You said this was just like cooking at home!” he said. “It’s foreplay!” The message is not subtle: Mom and Dad Oz have amazing sex! They are super healthy and hot for each other! Lisa’s casserole recipe has “lots of fiber!” Of course he’s a “typical man” but it’s fine with Lisa because have you seen him shirtless?
The cookbook, which came out 10 years ago, was a somewhat awkward attempt to correct the perception of Dr. Oz as healthy to the point of joy-less. But the vegan casserole, which even when styled for its TV appearance, looks lumpy and unappetizing, was clearly more healthy than “joyful and abundant” as Lisa claims in the segment. In a 2010 profile of Oz for the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni reported on Oz’s actual eating habits:
I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies, plastic containers and Thermoses of food and drink, and all of it — every crumb, every drop — was healthful: low-fat Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored berries; spinach; slaw; raw almonds; raw walnuts, soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit; a dark green concoction of juices from vegetables including cucumber and parsley. Roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, as if on cue, he would ingest something from his movable buffet, but only a bit, his portions assiduously regulated, like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.
His wife, Lisa, says, “He doesn’t have the relationship with food that a lot of people have.” [...] Oz confirms as much: “At an office birthday party, I’ll have a bite of something, and I won’t feel good.” Worse yet is the aftermath of a vacation during which he has not had as much control over his diet and exercise as usual. “I feel differently immediately when I start to put weight on,” he says. “I don’t like that sluggish, blunted disposition that I have when that happens.”
This was published a few years before the (later disproven) rumor that President Obama only ate seven almonds every night as a snack, and a decade or more before the onslaught of macro counting and Huberman hacks that dominate male diet culture today. Dr. Oz was an early adopter, as well as ambassador for the kind of meticulous eating habits and obsessive attention to ingredients that are de rigeur in diet and wellness culture today.
Dr. Oz was a Huberman Husband before Andrew Huberman ever had a podcast. And his primary metric for health and well-being, as he told Bruni, is weight.
Why are Dr. Oz’s personal eating habits, let alone his public performance of his marriage, relevant to his qualifications to be administrator of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services? Because that job makes Oz responsible for the healthcare access of around 160 million Americans with significantly less privilege than him. Millions are older or disabled; the majority are significantly poorer than Oz, who owns multiple homes. The average Medicaid user does not work a job where they can tote around a personal stash of green juices and Greek yogurt. They don’t have his unlimited budget for supplements. They don’t have a wife at home eager to make vegan casseroles from scratch every night after she gets back from Pilates. They don’t go to aerial yoga or vacation regularly on tropical beaches.
And Oz has been getting rich, for decades now, by selling these Americans the promise that if they just do what he says, just live a little more like he does, they too will be thin and healthy forever. (They can also sign up for one of the private health insurance plans he has shilled.)
Wrote Bruni in 2010:
The show holds [Oz] up as the sort of finely tuned machine that you, on the couch at home, yearn to be. And that underscores his determination to be an omniscient and omnipresent commentator on health-related affairs, one-stop shopping for all your somatic curiosities and some of your spiritual and intellectual ones to boot.
In Dr. Oz’s world, people get sick because of “lifestyle choices.” There is no conversation about social determinants of health; how chronic experiences of poverty, racism and other systemic forms of oppression take their physiological tolls on bodies and make it more difficult to access quality medical care. There is no recognition that being able to afford groceries, let alone have time to cook them, is a prerequisite for achieving his version of “eating healthy.” There is no awareness that his audience at home on the couch lead lives that look absolutely nothing like his.
Dr. Oz, like his good friend and soon-to-be-boss, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, wants to believe that America’s epidemic of chronic disease can be solved by handing everyone a prescription to eat healthy and exercise. This is the “up by the bootstraps” mentality that runs rampant through the Make American Healthy Again movement. The problem is never a broken system or widespread bias; it’s you not having the discipline to track your family’s 1,000 hours of outside time; it’s you not trying hard enough; it’s you not being enough.
We won’t know until Dr. Oz gets confirmed and starts the gig exactly how this mindset impacts the health of the 155 million Americans who rely on his agency. But if being healthy (and thin) is now our patriotic duty, an awful lot of us are in trouble.
Having sat in classrooms with my fellow doctors-to-be, I can confidently say that the skill set needed to become a cardiothoracic surgeon (4 years of monklike living through medical school followed by five years of brutal, dehumanizing residency) does not naturally translate into institutional leadership. This is a narcissistic personality looking for a brighter spotlight.
I knew most of this about Dr. Oz already, and yet reading it all enumerated here was so much more depressing than I expected.
(You should still read this. It's critical to understanding how this will affect health care and, more broadly, our conception of what it means to be well.)