Senate Confirms Dr. Oz to Lead CMS

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53-45 vote was largely along party llines

by
Joyce Frieden, Washington Editor, MedPage Today
April 3, 2025

By a vote of 53-45, the Senate confirmed Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA, a cardiothoracic surgeon and TV personality, as the next administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Oz’s nomination was not without controversy. “During his confirmation hearing, Dr. Oz was given the chance to assure the American people that he would not be a rubber stamp for Republican plans to gut Medicaid and hike Affordable Care Act premiums. At every turn, he failed the test,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said late last month when the committee voted 14-13 to recommend that Oz be confirmed. “When I asked him a yes or no question about whether he would protect Medicaid, he dodged, he weaved, he simply wouldn’t answer.”

But Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) expressed a more positive view. “Dr. Oz’s background makes him uniquely qualified to manage the intricacies of CMS,” Crapo said. “Dr. Oz discussed his vision to ensure CMS provides Americans with access to superb care, especially for our most vulnerable patients. I look forward to working with him, if he is confirmed, to accomplish this goal.” He also praised Oz’s willingness to “work to fix the broken clinician payment system and partner with Congress to achieve pharmaceutical benefit manager [PBM] reform.”

Wyden’s comments notwithstanding, Oz received generally good marks at his confirmation hearing last month; one of the topics discussed was prior authorization. Specifically, Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), asked Oz what should be done about the excessive use of prior authorization in the Medicare Advantage program. “This issue of preauthorization is a pox on the system,” Oz said; he used the word “preauthorization” throughout the hearing. “Preauthorization is misused in some settings, [although] there needs to be a mechanism to confirm that procedures are worthwhile.”

He suggested that Medicare limit the number of procedures requiring prior authorization to 1,000 “and be very clear — if you’re going to have a knee replacement and you can bend your knee more than 120 degrees — or whatever number you want to put in there — you don’t get to get the knee replacement,” he said. “And then, if we know those [criteria] ahead of time, just like a credit card approval doesn’t take you 3 months, you know immediately whether the transaction is approved or not. We will be able to do something similar, so that preauthorization could happen rapidly.”

Also at the hearing, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) asked Oz for his thoughts on Georgia’s work requirement program for Medicaid — which has been implemented through a CMS waiver — that requires beneficiaries each month to prove that they’re working, volunteering, or in school so that they can continue getting their Medicaid benefits. “Do you think a family should have to fill out paperwork every month just to get healthcare?” Warnock asked.

“I don’t think you need to use paperwork to prove a work requirement, and I don’t think that should be used as an obstacle, a disingenuous effort to block people from getting on Medicaid,” Oz said. “However, I believe we both probably believe there’s value in work, and it doesn’t have to be going to a job — it could be getting education, it could be showing that you want to contribute to society.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) brought up the issue of Medicare Advantage plans that have been padding patient records with extra diagnoses in order to get higher per-patient payments from Medicare.

“We are, I think, as an agency aware of this,” Oz said. “If confirmed, this will be one of the topics that is relatively enjoyable to go after, because I think we have bipartisan support.” Warren said she “loved” that response.

But Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) was not happy with the answer Oz gave when she asked him what he would do if President Trump asked him to do something that would violate the law — Would he obey the president or follow the law?

“The president would never do that,” Oz said. Hassan called that response “absurd” and “disappointing” and said during the committee vote that it was one reason she could not vote to recommend him.