Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to be a tough sell for U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
“RFK will come before the committee, and I’m troubled by some of the, in my view, health misinformation that he’s propagated in the past. But I have to admit, I don’t know him that well. Never met him,” said Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which will handle the vetting of Kennedy’s Cabinet nomination.
The nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be led by the Senate Finance Committee, of which Warner, D-Va., is a member.
Count Warner as a skeptic on both Oz and Kennedy.
“It’s quite a proposal to have Robert Kennedy, who is a medicine skeptic and a vaccine skeptic, versus a doctor who sells, I think, supplements on TV,” Warner said. “Again, all of these nominees deserve a fair hearing, but they got to have a hearing. You got to have the American public see them testify. They’ve got to answer questions on across-the-board cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, especially from a president who said he’s not going to touch Medicare at all.”
Oz ran for the U.S. Senate in the 2022 cycle, and lost to Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman, who said he would be open to voting to confirm Oz, if Oz would pledge to preserve Medicare and Medicaid.
“The question that Sen. Fetterman put on the table is an important one, but also, CMS administers the Affordable Care Act, the exchanges, the program that has enabled about 30 million Americans to have health insurance for the first time in their life, and that has protected tens of millions Americans from discrimination based on pre-existing health conditions,” Kaine said.
“A really important question for him is, are you committed to maintaining and improving the Affordable Care Act? Are you on board with a vaguely defined plan similar to that President Trump in his first term just to repeal the ACA with no substitute in place, and President-elect Trump’s claim that he has a concept of a plan that might replace the repeal of the ACA that gives nobody comfort who is relying upon the ACA for their healthcare?” Kaine said.
Another question for Oz that Kaine would want answered: “the fact that you were a physician, how does that qualify you to run this office?”
“A lot of people don’t know this, but CMS has a bigger budget than the Pentagon. Because Medicaid and Medicare are such massive programs, it is the agency with the largest budget in the United States,” Kaine said. “At least off the top of my head, I’m unaware of Dr. Oz running any kind of organization, agency, company, anything of any size, much less the federal agency with the largest budget, and it’s also the federal agency that the people who rely on it rely on it with a with a with a degree of urgency and passion.”
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Chris Graham
