LIVE: Senate confirmation hearing for Dr. Oz, Trump's nominee to lead Medicaid and Medicare
What this video covers
ABC News livestreams Dr. Mehmet Oz’s full Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on March 14, 2025, as Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; the stream opens with the tail end of the committee’s debate over a Treasury nominee before the Oz hearing begins. Oz’s opening statement promises transparency tools for beneficiaries, AI to cut clinician paperwork, and aggressive anti-fraud enforcement. Democrats press him on Medicaid cuts, DOGE access to health data, nursing-home staffing, and his television promotion of weight-loss supplements, while Republicans steer him toward prior authorization, PBMs, and Medicare Advantage overpayments.
Key points
- In his opening statement, Oz paints a system in crisis: healthcare costs growing two to three percent faster than the economy, a Medicare trust fund insolvent within a decade, 43% of Americans obese, and chronic disease driving three-quarters of the $1.7 trillion CMS spends each year; his three priorities are beneficiary transparency tools, AI to liberate clinicians from paperwork, and modernized anti-fraud tools.
- Ranking Member Ron Wyden demands a yes-or-no pledge to oppose Medicaid cuts; Oz repeats that he “cherishes” Medicaid but declines to commit, arguing the way to protect it is to keep it viable — Wyden notes for the record that the question went unanswered. Oz does accept Wyden’s invitation to visit Malheur County, Oregon, within 60 days of confirmation.
- Oz tells Sen. Michael Bennet that Medicare Advantage has the economics “upside down,” citing MedPAC findings that MA plans are paid 106 to 120 percent of what comparable traditional-Medicare patients cost, and he vows to attack systemic upcoding: “there’s a new sheriff in town.”
- Sen. Maggie Hassan confronts Oz over his TV endorsement of green coffee extract and raspberry ketones, which she quotes him calling a “number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat”; Oz says he never called green coffee extract a miracle drug and that he was paid nothing to promote supplements, while Hassan accuses him of refusing accountability for promoting “unproven snake oil remedies.”
- Sen. Raphael Warnock challenges Georgia’s Medicaid work-requirement paperwork, citing a traveling nurse and a full-time caregiver who lost coverage; Oz says he favors work requirements but that paperwork should not be “a disingenuous effort to block people,” that volunteering and education should count, and that both of Warnock’s examples deserve Medicaid.
- On nursing-home staffing, Oz resists endorsing a 24/7 on-site registered-nurse rule, suggesting telemedicine could deliver equivalent care amid workforce shortages; and he tells Sen. Chuck Grassley “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes — and maybe” to expectations on PBM accountability, rural health programs, complex-needs children, transitional health plans, and congressional oversight.
- In closing questions, Oz calls broker “churning” of Medicare Advantage policies a leading marketing abuse, floats multi-year MA enrollment instead of annual re-election, and questions whether some MA incentive money should be returned to taxpayers so the program does not cost more than fee-for-service Medicare.