Jezebel | Dr. Oz, Who Thinks All Abortion Is ‘Murder,’ Could Now Have Power Over Abortion Access
By Kylie Cheung | Originally Published by Jezebel
President-elect Donald Trump won the election two weeks ago, and his bad appointees just keep rolling in. On Tuesday, he announced Dr. Oz—reality TV star and failed GOP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania—to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The agency is part of the Health and Human Services Department, which Trump nominated anti-vaccine extremist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run. Oz, who doesn’t need confirmation from the Senate, would be responsible for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.
In his announcement, Trump celebrated Oz as “a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention,” without any evidence of this, and declared that Oz “will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” He also assured us that Oz “will work closely with RFK Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex.”
Because Oz ran for Senate, in addition to running a years-long TV program that frequently aired disturbing medical misinformation, we know everything about him and the harm he could inflict overseeing health insurance programs for millions of older, poor, and disabled Americans. For years, the ACA has helped expand access to health insurance for low-income and sick Americans by banning patients from being charged for more coverage if they have preexisting medical conditions. In 2022, Oz said he opposed the law.
But most worrisome is that CMS has played an increasingly important role in abortion policy. Under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals that receive Medicare funding are required to provide stabilizing, emergency care to patients, including abortions. CMS has previously investigated hospitals for reported EMTALA violations involving abortion; if the hospital is found at fault, they can face fines or penalties.
As pregnant people continue to be denied stabilizing abortions in states with abortion bans, CMS should play a greater role in holding hospitals accountable under federal law. But we can expect Oz to take things in the opposite direction. As recently as May 2022, while running for Senate, Oz declared at a town hall that abortion at any stage of pregnancy is murder: “If life starts at conception, why do you care what age the heart starts beating at? It’s, you know, it’s still murder, if you were to terminate a child whether their heart’s beating or not.” At the Senate debate months later, he said “there should not be involvement from the federal government,” but that the state government is fine. Specifically, he said decisions about abortion should be between “women, doctors, [and] local political leaders.” Oz’s website also called him “100% pro-life,” suggesting he supports fetal personhood.
If EMTALA sounds familiar, it’s because, over the summer, the Supreme Court ultimately declined to rule on whether the federal law protects a pregnant person’s right to receive an emergency abortion at a Medicare-funded emergency room. The case, Moyle v. United States, involved Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, and the Court basically punted it. So while the Court didn’t side with anti-abortion attorneys for Idaho, some of the conservative justices did agree with their arguments that fetuses should be legally recognized patients under EMTALA at the expense of pregnant people.
Katie O’Connor, the senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), told Jezebel the organization is “incredibly troubled” by Oz’s nomination. “This country is in the midst of a serious and devastating public health crisis in the wake of the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. CMS has a central role to play in responding to that crisis,” O’Connor said. “But this nomination suggests that the incoming administration has no intention to try and address it at all.” The NWLC has previously represented women who have been denied emergency abortions, including a Missouri woman who successfully filed an EMTALA complaint to CMS.
Rebecca Hart Holder, president of Reproductive Equity Now, told Jezebel the risks Oz poses at CMS expand beyond abortion to the full range of reproductive care. “By putting an anti-abortion, anti-woman TV doctor in charge of [CMS], Trump is directly threatening access to contraceptive care guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act,” she said. Holder warned that Oz’s nomination jeopardizes “our nation’s worsening maternal health crisis, and he is threatening reproductive health care services for low-income people across our country.”
On top of Oz’s alarming positions, he has a history of degrading comments about women, as well as low-income, uninsured people—in 2014, he said uninsured Americans have “no right to health” and instead receive health care via degrading, 15-minute screenings in a “festival-like setting.” Like RFK Jr., Oz opposes life-saving vaccine mandates and has similarly embraced dangerous pseudoscience. Oh, and he also famously saw to the death of over 300 dogs and puppies as a researcher at Columbia in the early 2000s. All around: Not great!
