Mehmet Oz, widely recognized as television’s “Dr. Oz” and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Medicare and Medicaid, has sparked controversy over resurfaced remarks from a 2013 speech, where he addressed the balance between personal and governmental responsibility for the uninsured.
Dr. Oz told members of the National Governors’ Association (video below) that uninsured Americans “don’t have the right to health,” but should be given “a way of crawling back out of the abyss of darkness of fear over not having the health they need.” That, he suggested, could come via physicals in a “festival-like setting.”
Oz, described by the AP as a “celebrity heart surgeon turned talk show host and lifestyle guru,” had urged members of the NGA to “think about” those physicals, promoting them as “incredibly inexpensive to run,” while declaring that “local hospitals will fund” them.
“You can screen thousands of people for almost nothing, and you allow a conversation and take place in more of a festival-like setting,” Oz said. “It’s not scary, and I mentioned earlier that almost everybody’s come into our 50-minute physicals has a job, but a lot don’t have insurance.” (At one point he appears to say “15-minute physicals,” and at another, “50-minute physicals.”)
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“Give them a way of crawling back out of the abyss of darkness of fear over not having the health they need, and give them an opportunity, cause they don’t have the right to health, but they have the right to access a chance to get that health.”
Earlier this month top Senate Democrats, in a letter to Oz, questioned both his qualifications to become the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, along with what they described as his previous call to privatize Medicare.
Democrats, led by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), in the letter, expressed to Oz, “concerns about your advocacy for the elimination of Traditional Medicare and your deep financial ties to private health insurers.”
NBC News reported that the “Democrats referred to a 2020 opinion piece that Oz co-wrote calling for putting all Americans into Medicare Advantage, effectively replacing the traditional Medicare program in which the government directly insures Americans 65 and older in tandem with private insurance plans.”
“Indeed, private insurers that run the Medicare Advantage program drastically overcharge for care,” the senators wrote, NBC News reported, saying they were “citing analysis from the nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Committee.”
The Hill added that the Democrats “said they were especially concerned about Oz’s potential conflicts of interest. Oz reported owning more than $550,000 in UnitedHealth stock in his 2022 financial disclosures. UnitedHealth is the largest private insurer under Medicare Advantage and largest employer of physicians in the nation.”
“The company is currently under a sprawling antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice — including for its role in aggressively upcoding Medicare Advantage enrollees to secure higher payments from CMS — and has been sued on multiple occasions for Medicare fraud. Under your plan, UnitedHealth’s revenue from Medicare Advantage would roughly double to $274 billion annually,” the Democrats wrote.
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In 2022, when the video first resurfaced during Oz’s failed campaign to become a Republican U.S. Senator for Pennsylvania, criticism was strong.
“This is such a crazy thing to say: ‘they don’t have the right to health’???” remarked journalist Soledad O’Brien.
Other commenters have also weighed in.
“As someone who studied health and healthcare in Guatemala, this sounds awful familiar,” wrote Dr. Caitlin Baird. “T minus two years until these ‘clinics’ are provided by ‘missionaries’ and pre-med volunteers with zero medical training.”
“For a physician to say that the uninsured don’t have the right to health is so unethical I am at a loss for word,” remarked pediatrician Jeffrey W Britton.
“This is the guy Trump wants in charge of healthcare for millions of Americans who cannot afford the healthcare he has access to,” observed former investigative reporter Jayne Miller. “’15 minute physicals’ Then what?”
Watch the video below or at this link.