Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead Medicare and Medicaid, at his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Finance Committee on March 14, 2025. Credit: ABC News screenshot from Youtube.
Here’s our problem
Medicare is a vital lifeline for seniors and disabled people, but it needs to be expanded to truly offer full coverage for medical expenses. The average household with someone who receives Medicare still has to pay $7,000 out of pocket every year. And many have to pay much more – 3 in 10 Medicare households spend more than 20% of their income on healthcare. On top of that, dental, hearing and vision treatment is not covered by Medicare.
A typical Medicare household spends more on healthcare costs than on food.
Healthcare should be a right – no one should have to pay because they got sick, especially seniors and people with disabilities.
The con game of billionaires
Trump wants to put Mehmet Oz in charge of Medicare by making him the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Dr. Oz has never run a large organization, but he does have plenty of experience selling fake cures to the public. He’s told his viewers that red onions prevent ovarian cancer, that green coffee bean extract is a “magic weight-loss cure for every body type”, and that astrological signs “may reveal a great deal about our health.”
But Dr. Oz isn’t just incompetent, he wants to turn Medicare into a source of private profit – but hides this position by presenting it as an expansion of “Medicare Advantage”. He wrote an op-ed with the CEO of insurance giant Kaiser Permanente calling for “Medicare Advantage for All”.
Medicare Advantage was created during the Clinton administration. CMS takes public money and gives it to private insurance corporations, which people can receive coverage from instead of traditional Medicare. The more people have to rely on Medicare Advantage plans, the closer the entire system is to being handed over to private, profit-driven corporations. Medicare Advantage plans are more likely to deny requests to authorize care, and rake in tens of billions of dollars making false diagnoses that no doctor ever actually treats.
Like every good con-artist, Dr. Oz makes sure he can profit from his lies. He owns a huge amount of stock in United Healthcare, which is the largest provider of Medicare Advantage plans.
The real answer for the working class
Rather than letting private insurance corporations take over through the “Medicare Advantage” scam, we should abolish the insurance companies once and for all. They are parasites. They don’t provide care, they don’t do anything useful – all they do is act as a middleman standing in between patients and their doctors.
A single, national system that covers 100% of the cost of all procedures should take their place. This system would cover people of all ages and with any disability or pre-existing condition. This policy would actually be much cheaper overall, because there wouldn’t be corporate executives lining their pockets every step of the way. Even Congress officially estimates this type of “single payer” system would save $650 billion per year.
And beyond that, the constitution should be amended so that healthcare is recognized as a fundamental right. We have the right to free speech, the right to a fair trial, the right to assemble – shouldn’t we also have the right to live if we get sick?
This article is also available as a downloadable pamphlet here.
