Politics
Dr. Oz Now Runs Your Medicare And Wants His Old Enemy To Switch Parties
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television personality turned failed Senate candidate turned federal health administrator, used a podcast appearance Thursday to publicly lobby for the political conversion of Sen. John Fetterman, the Democrat who ended Oz's political career in November 2022 by eleven percentage points.
Oz, who was confirmed in February as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a role that gives him authority over roughly $1.5 trillion in annual federal health spending, said he considers Fetterman an "unexpected star" and expressed hope that the senator would formally join the Republican Party. He did not explain how recruiting the opposition is part of CMS's core mission, and no reporter followed up.
"John is someone who just gets it," Oz said during the podcast, which ran for approximately ninety minutes and also covered the healing properties of olive oil. "He's got authenticity. He's got the energy. He's got the working-class thing. We need that."
What "we" means coming from the man whose net worth is estimated at $100 million and who commuted to his Pennsylvania campaign from his wife's family mansion in New Jersey was not immediately clarified.
Fetterman had appeared the previous day at the Republican National Committee's midterm convention in what sources described as a surprise, and which at least three Republican operatives privately described as "extremely on brand for a guy who shows up to the Senate in a hoodie."
Fetterman's office did not respond to a request for comment, which is its right and also arguably the correct move.
Oz's public admiration for Fetterman marks a notable shift from 2022, when his campaign ran advertisements suggesting that Fetterman was cognitively unfit for office following the senator's stroke. Fetterman won anyway. Oz then leveraged that loss into a federal appointment overseeing the health insurance of 160 million Americans, which is one way a story can go.
Political observers noted that Oz's recruitment pitch is complicated by the fact that he has no authority over party membership, no relationship with Fetterman beyond losing to him, and a confirmation hearing that included the phrase "I understand that pasta is not a vegetable" in a Medicare context that still has not been fully explained.
Former Trump campaign strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon, reached by text, replied only with a thumbs-up emoji, which his spokesperson later clarified was "not an endorsement of anything specifically."
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said in a statement that the party "welcomes all Americans who share our values," a sentence that has appeared in every RNC statement since 1994 and has never once specified what those values are.
Fetterman, for his part, has spent recent months breaking with Senate Democratic leadership on immigration, Israel, and at least two procedural votes that caused Politico to run the phrase "Fetterman goes rogue" a total of seven times in a single calendar quarter.
None of this means he is becoming a Republican. It means he is a senator from Pennsylvania who wore a Carhartt to a black-tie event and has decided that being unpredictable is more interesting than being reliable, which, to be fair, it is.
Oz is scheduled to testify before the Senate Finance Committee next month on proposed Medicaid cuts. Fetterman sits on no committees with jurisdiction over CMS, making the entire recruitment pitch not only socially strange but operationally useless.
The podcast has 14,000 subscribers.
The story we are making fun of: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/6083586-oz-wants-fetterman-join-gop/