75 Groups Urge Senators to Oppose Dr. Oz’s Nomination

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Dear senators,

The 75 undersigned organizations representing diverse interests, including consumer safety, public health, faith, racial justice and labor organizations, urge you to vote against Dr. Mehmet Oz’s nomination to serve as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and to publicly announce your opposition as soon as possible if you have not yet already done so.

Dr. Oz has massive conflicts of interest, peddles unproven “cures” for personal profit, and represents an existential threat to the Medicare program.

Dr. Oz owned between $280,000 and $600,000 in shares in UnitedHealth Group,^[1] a major Medicare Advantage insurer, and between $50,000 and $100,000 in shares of CVS Health, based on disclosures from 2022.^[2]^,[3] Dr. Oz previously publicly promoted unproven treatments for COVID-19 as well as supplements without sufficient evidence of their effectiveness.^[4] He also appears to have violated marketing disclosure requirements in promoting the supplement company, iHerb, on social media.^[5]

If confirmed as the Administrator of CMS, based on his prior writings, we should expect Dr. Oz to seek to further privatize our health care system, including supercharging ongoing efforts to privatize Medicare, which would threaten access to care for seniors and people with disabilities.^[6]

Further privatizing Medicare would leave millions more Americans at the whim of greedy health insurance corporations at a time Americans are already feeling the burden of our broken system.^[7] Privatized Medicare Advantage companies are doing a worse job serving beneficiaries than traditional Medicare.^[8] Companies offering privatized Medicare Advantage plans often make it difficult for patients to get the care they need and for doctors to provide necessary care.^[9]

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General found that privatized Medicare insurers were denying large numbers of Medicare enrollees medically necessary care.^[10] Similarly, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that patients with significant care needs,^[11] including those in the last year of their life,^[12] were more likely to drop their privatized Medicare Advantage plan and return to traditional Medicare. This indicates that these patients were unable to receive necessary care and returned to traditional Medicare where their choice of provider and access to services are guaranteed.

These 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.^[13] If this trend continues, we could be overpaying insurance companies by more than $1 trillion over the next decade.^[14]

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.

We urge you to announce your opposition to Dr. Oz’s nomination as CMS Administrator.

Signed,

National Organizations

314 Action
ACA Consumer Advocacy
American Economic Liberties Project
American Muslim Health Professionals (AMHP)
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Be A Hero
Beta Cell Action
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Center for Medicare Advocacy
CenterLink: The Community of LGBTQ Centers
Coalition on Human Needs
Consilium Scientific
Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute
Defend Public Health
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF)
Disability Victory
Doctors for America
Health Care Voter
Healthcare NOW
Indivisible
Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health
Just Care USA
Labor Campaign for Single Payer
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
MomsRising
NAACP
National Association of Social Workers
National Consumers League
National Council of Jewish Women
National Health Law Program
National LGBTQI+ Cancer Network
National Women’s Law Center
NBJC
Nurses for America
Oregonizers
People Power United
People’s Action
Physicians for a National Health Program
Popular Democracy Action
Positive Women’s Network-USA
Progressive Democrats of America
Protect Our Care
Public Advocacy for Kids (PAK)
Public Citizen
Social Security Works
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
UltraViolet Action
Universities Allied for Essential Medicines
Vision y Compromiso
Voices for Progress
Voices of Health Care Action
Young Invincibles

State and Local Organizations

Act for Democracy
AIDS Foundation Chicago
AIDS Resource
BHE-INC
Center for Health Progress
Citizen Action/Illinois
Doctors Organized for Health Care Solutions
Indivisible Marin
Healthcare is a Human Right WA
Metro New York Health Care for All
MN Insulin 4 All (T1International)
New York Doctors Coalition
Ohio Nurses for America
Pennsylvania Stands Up
PSARA (Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action)
Rise Up WV
South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center
The People’s Lobby
Unity Fellowship of Christ Church-NYC
Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut
VOCAL-NY
Washington Community Action Network
WV Citizen Action