By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had chosen television personality and surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a wide-reaching agency with annual spending of $2.6 trillion.
Trump, who endorsed Oz in his unsuccessful run in Pennsylvania for the U.S. Senate in 2022, said he would work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Oz said in a post on social media website X he was looking forward "to serving my country to Make America Healthy Again under" Kennedy's leadership.
Trump said the pair would take on "the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake" as well as cutting what he called waste and fraud.
"Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country's budget," Trump said in a statement.
The agency runs Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people aged 65 or older and the disabled. The office also oversees Medicaid, the state-based health insurance program for low-income people, which is jointly funded by states and the federal government. The two programs provide health insurance for over 140 million Americans.
It also handles much of the enrollment in income-based government-subsidized health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump and other Republicans have previously tried to repeal the law but now say they only seek to overhaul it.
His nomination is less likely to cause negative reaction among pharmaceutical companies than Kennedy's, an outspoken critic of drugmakers, said BMO analyst Evan Seigerman.
"While Oz has been controversial and a noted TV personality, his stance on expanded Medicare coverage and tackling ... pricing challenges could be a positive for the industry in the long run," he wrote in a note.
Oz was a regular Fox News commentator during the COVID-19 pandemic and a proponent of unproven treatments for COVID-19 including hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug whose use against the disease was also backed by Trump.
Oz challenged the Biden administration's COVID-19 pandemic policies on social media, including mask policies, saying they ignored the science and were based on missing data.
In 2020, he was a proponent of expanding Medicare Advantage plans in which insurers manage healthcare benefits paid for by the government to all Americans who were not enrolled in Medicaid in a column published in Forbes magazine.
Oz promoted Medicare Advantage on his syndicated daytime television talk show, which aired between 2009 and 2022, in segments sponsored by a website selling the plans.
Shares of all major health insurers in the U.S. were marginally up after the decision with UnitedHealth (NYSE:UNH), Humana (NYSE:HUM) and Molina Healthcare (NYSE:MOH) moving up between 1% and 2% in after-hours trade.
Trump promised during his campaign not to cut Medicare but is expected to let federal subsidies for Medicaid expire at the end of 2025.
After RFK Jr. was named to the job last week, Oz told Fox News that he knew the HHS secretary nominee personally. The position is subject to Senate confirmation.