Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), suggested in an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns that the president’s “one big, beautiful bill” will not cut Medicaid.
“We’re not cutting Medicaid,” Oz told Burns, adding that both his and Trump’s goal is to “save Medicaid.” The prominent administration official’s statement comes as Democrats allege that Trump’s sweeping tax and spending package would cut the six-decade-old entitlement program — and some Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns as well.
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“I’ve seen the proposals. There is no proposal I’ve seen, in fact, in fairness, that doesn’t increase spending on Medicaid,” Oz stated.
“If you read the actual language that we’re working with, it is designed for one major purpose: to allow the president of the United States and the governors who run the states to align on what we should be doing for the most vulnerable members of the population,” Oz said in a clip of the interview provided by Politico.
In the interview, set to release in full on Sunday’s episode of Politico’s “The Conversation,” Oz seemed to assuage concerns of some GOP senators, including Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. The populist lawmaker wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in May that “a noisy contingent of corporatist Republicans” wants to build the “big, beautiful bill around slashing health insurance for the working poor.”
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Trump told Hawley in April that he will not sign a bill containing any cuts to Medicaid benefits, according to an X post by the Missouri lawmaker.
In a closed-door meeting before the upper chamber passed the president’s spending bill, Trump reportedly told House Republicans not to “fuck around with Medicaid.”
The House-passed bill includes Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied childless adults, that are slated to go into effect on Dec. 31, 2026. Under the legislation passed May 22 also disincentivizes Medicaid expansion, and cuts Medicaid dollars used for sex change procedures and therapies for both children and adults.
Before Trump nominated him to lead the CMS, Oz was the host of the popular daytime talk show, “The Dr. Oz Show.” He was also notably the Republican Pennsylvania Senate nominee in 2022.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
