If confirmed to be the next U.S. secretary of health and human services, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could be working “closely” with another official who’s infamous for his questionable health guidance: Dr. Mehmet Oz, who President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump said in a statement that if confirmed, Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency” — a plan that advocates for Medicare said would be carried out by privatizing the healthcare program that serves more than 66 million senior citizens.

As The Lever reported in 2022, Oz aggressively pushed Medicare Advantage plans on his show, The Dr. Oz Show, airing one segment about the insurance agency MedicareAdvantage.com and urging viewers to sign up for the program via a hotline. Insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans are notorious for requiring “prior authorization” for doctors to provide certain medical procedures, subjecting patients to deceptive marketing, and harming senior citizens.

Considering his opposition to traditional Medicare, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project said Oz “is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of healthcare spending.”

Dr. Oz is not a good pick for a very powerful position in charge of a trillion dollars of health care spending. He wants to privatize what's left of traditional Medicare and owns stock in a bunch of big health platform companies like United and CVS. https://t.co/FcX64nmXES pic.twitter.com/ibSgfwGAKE

The advocacy group Social Security Works noted that plans to “completely privatize Medicare” are also in........

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