Oz held millions in Medicare-tied firms

Dr. Mehmet Oz, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the top health insurance regulator in the country, has invested in companies that do business with the agency he would run.

Oz, Trump's choice to run Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplace, owned up to $33.7million of stock in these companies when he filed a financial disclosure during his losing 2022 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

At that time, the TV talk show host owned between $280,000 and $600,000 in UnitedHealth Group and between $50,000 and $100,000 in CVS Health, both of which provide health insurance plans under Medicare Advantage. He owned between $5M and $25M in a digital health company called Sharecare and received dividends between $100,000 and $1M.

He owned between $5.8million and $26.7million in Amazon and between $1.6million and $6.3million in Microsoft, two major technology providers for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency he would run.

"All nominees and appointees will comply with the ethical obligations of their respective agencies," Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, said in a statement when asked if Oz still owns these stocks.

Nick Clemens, Oz's spokesperson on the Trump transition team, told USA TODAY that Oz sold his stake in Sharecare, which went private this year. He did not answer questions as to whether Oz still owns the other stocks.

Accountable.US, a left-leaning group that compiled some of the research, said it did not find evidence in Securities and Exchange Commission filings that Oz had sold stocks in Amazon or Microsoft since 2022.

Seven senators including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote a letter to Oz on Tuesday asking if he would divest "from any and all financial holdings related to the insurance industry" and recuse himself from any decisions that impact companies in which he has a financial interest.

"Given your financial ties to private insurers, combined with your view that the traditional Medicare program is 'highly dysfunctional' and your advocacy for eliminating it entirely, it is not clear that you are qualified for this critical job," the senators wrote.

Oz in 2020 said the federal government should allow all Americans to purchase coverage through Medicare Advantage, a program in which private insurers sell Medicare-regulated plans to seniors and people with disabilities.

UnitedHealth Group is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, which covered 29% of Medicare Advantage patients in 2024, according to the health care research group KFF. CVS Health covers another 12%. Sharecare announced in 2022 one of its brands had become "available as a free in-home personal care benefit to more than 1.5million Medicare Advantage members," a number that then rose to 2million.

For the new post, Oz will fill out another ethics form. The Office of Government Ethics and ethics officials at the Department of Health and Human Services will review it for conflicts of interest and create an ethics agreement.

Many nominees divest from conflicted assets within 60 or 90 days of their appointment, Marsco said. Or people might recuse themselves from decisions that impact their finances. She said it would be easier for Oz to recuse himself from tech contracts than matters involving health insurance.

"It's possible that almost everything he touches would impact those (health insurance) stocks, because CMS and the private insurers are so intertwined with Medicare Advantage," she said.