Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, declared that the administration will no longer “tolerate” what he called a culture that makes it “easy to be sick in America.” Framing childhood illness as a failure of parenting and physical activity rather than medical need, Oz linked obesity to national security and warned that industries would be forced to cooperate—or face government retaliation.
Oz—often called a conspiracy theorist who has been widely criticized for promoting “quack” products—appeared to endorse an authoritarian vision of public health, suggesting that under Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Americans would no longer be allowed to remain “sick” without consequences, and threatened industry with demands to either cooperate or face retribution.
He also railed against what he called the “over-medicalization” of American society—particularly among children—but failed to distinguish between conditions driven by behavior and those rooted in biology or beyond individual control.
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“You’re diagnosing problems that probably should be dealt with with the parents,” he told Fox News Business, referring to children’s health, “or by going out and playing, or just dealing with issues and teaching kids how to mental resilience [sic].”
He warned of risk factors that “cause an obesity epidemic that now prevents three quarters of young men from entering the military,” a questionable claim, and said that this “crisis” is “rolling up towards the older ages.”
“There’s a reason we’re twice as obese as [our] European counterpart countries, we’re ten times more obese than Japan: we’ve made it easy to be sick in America. And this president and this Secretary of Health, Bobby Kennedy, they’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” Oz declared.
Warning that he and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, “are the tip of the spear,” he threatened “to make sure that we get industry to work with us, or we’ll be coming after them.”
Dr. Oz has a history of linking healthcare policy to politics.
In 2022, during his failed senatorial campaign, Oz said he wanted abortion to be between a woman, her doctors, and local political leaders.
More recently, Oz has said Americans must “earn the right” to be on Medicaid, and said current Medicaid users should “prove you matter.”
Critics, meanwhile, blasted Oz’s latest remarks.
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California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom responded, telling Oz, “You just stripped 17 million people of their healthcare.”
Dr. Rachel Bedard, an internist, geriatrician, and palliative care physician, wrote: “Stop being sick, Americans. They aren’t gonna tolerate it anymore.”
Anthony M. Hopper, who teaches healthcare administration, noted, “You know … We would be a lot healthier (in the future) if we spent more money on medical research.”
Retired professor MA Rasmussen wrote: “So you guys are OK with the gutting of the EPA, an agency created to protect us from polluted air & water & the Labor Department which enforces worker safety rules? I guess so. You’re all into blaming the individual rather than corporations or agribusiness or bad public policy.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
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