Amna Nawaz:

President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two more people to his administration: investment banker Howard Lutnick as Secretary of Commerce, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the famous TV personality and heart surgeon, as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Dr. Oz will oversee programs that provide health care coverage to about half of all Americans.

His talk show, which ran for nearly fifteen years, was one of the most popular during the day, but he has promoted questionable medical treatments that are not supported by experts and has sometimes promoted misinformation.

In making the announcement, Mr. Trump said that Dr. Oz fit perfectly into the Make America Healthy campaign.

STAT News’ Lev Facher has been following Oz’s career, and he joins me now.

Lev, thanks for being with us.

So you have Dr. Oz profiled during his 2022 Senate campaign in Pennsylvania, and you pointed out at the time that while he is a physician and noted heart surgeon, he has also spent much of his career embracing falsehoods, as you put it. . What did you mean by that and what kind of reaction did you hear when he was appointed head of CMS?