Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) expressed skepticism about Dr. Mehmet Ounces’s, President Trump’s pick out to supervise Medicare and Medicaid, perspectives on abortion and transgender rights.
“I’ve been reading up on Dr. Oz – I see he’s praised trans surgeries for minors and supported hormone treatments & puberty blockers for kids in the past,” Hawley wrote on X. “And has also criticized state laws protecting life. I hope he’s changed his views to match President Trump!”
“We need the Trump agenda at CMS,” Hawley stated.
Hawley was once responding to his authentic account, which confirmed the questions he deliberate to invite Ounces all through his affirmation procedure within the Senate.
If showed, Ounces would take over the $1.5 trillion company, regardless of having no enjoy working a big forms.
As a TV persona who won nationwide consideration as a scientific knowledgeable on Oprah Winfrey’s communicate display within the 2000s and along with his personal display “The Dr. Oz Show,” Ounces’s politics had been to start with unclear.
Hawley has deliberate to query Ounces about him internet hosting “various transgender advocates,” surgeons who carried out transgender-related surgical procedures and minors who mentioned “switching genders.
He additionally deliberate to query Ounces on using puberty blockers for minors, the Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Preferrred Court docket choice, fetal heartbeat regulations, and lots of different questions.
Ounces hosted what the Homosexual and Lesbian Alliance In opposition to Defamation (GLAAD) group referred to as on the time a “groundbreaking” interview with transgender adolescence. Ounces’s display has since been considered through LGTBQ+ advocates as selling false or deceptive scientific claims, in particular in regards to the LGBTQ+ group.
Ounces has a historical past of endorsing frequently debatable merchandise, blurring the traces between pitching for celebrities and being an informed scientific authentic.
He’s the most recent in Trump’s appointees to have in the past gave the impression on TV and been a debatable pick out to steer a federal company.