End Citizens United (ECU) President Tiffany Muller issued the following statement on new research from Accountable.US exposing Mehmet Oz for investing in companies that would directly profit from decisions he’d make as the head of Medicare and Medicaid:
“If Oz’s confirmation goes through and he continues to hold these investments, it’s impossible to believe he’ll act in the best interest of the American people. This glaring conflict of interest makes him entirely unfit to lead Medicare and Medicaid––and it’s a scam waiting to happen. Americans deserve a leader who will protect their care, not someone whose decision-making will be guided by their wallet.”
USA Today: Dr. Mehmet Oz had up to $33 million in companies doing business with agency he’d run
Erin Mansfield
12/13/2024
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the top health insurance regulator in the country, Dr. Mehmet Oz, has invested in companies that do business with the agency he would run.
Oz, Trump’s choice to run Medicare, Medicaid and the insurance marketplace under the Affordable Care Act, owned up to $33.7 million stock in these companies when he filed a financial disclosure during his unsuccessful 2022 campaign for Senate in Pennsylvania.
The TV talk show host owned between $280,000 and $600,000 in UnitedHealth Group and between $50,000 and $100,000 in CVS Health, which both provide health insurance plans under Medicare Advantage.
He also owned between $5.8 million and $26.7 million in Amazon and between $1.6 million and $6.3 million in Microsoft, two major technology providers for the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services, the agency he would run.
Accountable.US, a left-leaning group that compiled some of the research, said it reviewed filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and was unable to find evidence that Oz sold stocks in Amazon or Microsoft since the 2022 filing.
“All nominees and appointees will comply with the ethical obligations of their respective agencies,” Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition, said in a statement to USA TODAY when asked if Oz still owns these stocks.
Oz will be required to fill out the same form after his official nomination as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
How these companies are tied to Medicare
Oz in 2020 said the federal government should allow all Americans to purchase coverage through Medicare Advantage, a program in which private insurance sell Medicare-regulated plans to seniors and people with disabilities.
In 2022, Oz owned stock in the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, which covered 29% of Medicare Advantage patients in 2024, according to the health care organization KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. CVS Health covers another 12%.
“Dr. Oz’s conflicts of interest pose a serious threat to seniors’ health security, but as long as big insurance industry megadonors are happy, President-elect Trump doesn’t seem to mind,” Tony Carrk, the executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Oz also owned as much as $33 million in Amazon and Microsoft. The agency’s most recent budget calls Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Government “the two primary cloud service providers to host our systems and data.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and six other senators wrote a letter to Oz on Tuesday asking if he would divest “from any and all financial holdings related to the insurance industry” and recuse himself from any decisions that impact insurance companies in which he has a financial interest.
“Given your financial ties to private insurers, combined with your view that the traditional Medicare program is ‘highly dysfunctional’ and your advocacy for eliminating it entirely, it is not clear that you are qualified for this critical job,” the Senators wrote.
Oz also owned between $5 million and $25 million in a digital health company called Sharecare and received dividends between $100,000 and $1 million, the 2022 disclosures show.
In 2022, Sharecare announced one of its brands had become “available as a free in-home personal care benefit to more than 1.5 million Medicare Advantage members.” The number reached 2 million in 2023. The company went private earlier this year.
Nick Clemens, Oz’s spokesman on the Trump-Vance transition team, told USA TODAY that Oz sold his stake in Sharecare but did not address questions as to whether Oz still owns the other stocks.
Dr. Oz’s ethical requirements
The Senate is required to confirm the appointment of the Medicare administrator. That means Oz, like Cabinet appointees, will be responsible for filling out the same ethics form he filled out while he was running for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022.
The Office of Government Ethics and ethics officials at the Department of Health and Human Services will then be responsible for going through the disclosures to review for potential conflicts of interest and creating an ethics agreement.
“There are always ways to avoid a conflict of interest, even if you are invested in something that might raise these complex problems,” said Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center, a good-government group. She said many nominees choose to divest from conflicted assets within 60 or 90 days of their appointment.
In other cases, Marsco said, a person might choose to recuse themselves from decisions that impact the person’s finances. She said it would be easier for Oz to recuse himself from technology contracts than matters involving health insurance.
“It’s possible that almost everything he touches would impact those (health insurance) stocks, because CMS and the private insurers are so intertwined with Medicare Advantage,” she said.
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