Donald Trump has picked Dr Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Of course, Dr Oz is another pick by President Elect Donald Trump from the TV personalities pool of candidates. Probably because that’s the only pool of candidates Donald Trump has ever heard of.
Dr Oz is supposedly (who knows if his nomination will last) going to head up this massive department which is responsible for some $1.6 TRILLION in spending and will cut waste in the system. How that is to be done is not clear.
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would nominate Dr. Mehmet Oz — celebrity TV host and former U.S. Senate candidate — as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator.
CMS operates or oversees programs that provide health coverage to about half of Americans, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Obamacare marketplace exchange Healthcare.gov.
Those four programs account for $1.6 trillion in spending, or nearly 25% of the entire federal budget, which Trump highlighted when he announced that Oz, a heart surgeon, was his pick to lead CMS, a division of the Health and Human Services Department.
Trump said last week that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist, as HHS secretary.
Oz previously hosted “The Dr. Oz Show,” a syndicated daytime television program, for more than a dozen years.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/19/trump-picks-dr-oz-to-lead-massive-medicare-medicaid-agency-cms.html
But I am absolutely not thrilled about having a TV personality in charge of some of our nation’s most important programs. Especially if he thinks he can just take a scalpel and start cutting away. Because just like with surgery, once you cut there’s no going back. The damage has been done and it takes time to heal. Time children, the old, and the impoverished DO NOT HAVE.
But I guess that’s the way of our world. Republicans believe people are not entitled to healthcare and any cutting they do is justified. It’s a myopic view of the world and our society. The Declaration of Independence made it clear that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are a fundamental aspect of American’s lives and I would say that impeding that by not providing the necessary healthcare to live that life is downright immoral.
I want to go back to the days when the nominations to programs and cabinet positions were people skilled and knowledgeable in the area in question and whose name you’ve never heard of.
Apparently come January we’re going to begin to live in a kakistocracy (a government run by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state). So that’s fun. I imagine President Elect Donald Trump will bring even more TV personalities into his administration and I imagine I’m going to be just as bothered by it. This is probably one of the more unfortunate realities that we could have lived in.