Dr. Oz On Affordability, Fighting Fraud, and AI in Healthcare | Hoover Institution

[on-hold music] This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution's Economic Policy Working Group, where we talk about economics, markets, and public policy. I'm John Harley, your host. Today I'm joined by Dr. Oz, who serves as the 17th administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the second Trump administration. He is a professor emeritus at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia Medical Center and has won nine Daytime Emmy Awards with his long-running daytime talk show, The Dr. Oz Show. I'm also joined by Dan Brillman, who is the director of Medicaid and CHIP, and, uh, deputy administrator at CMS, and Kim Brandt, who is CMS's chief operating officer, as well as a deputy administrator. Thank you so much for, for joining us. Really an honor to have you all here. And I wanna start... I just really, you know, gotta tell you, you know, I think with most administrations, very few people have any idea sort of what CMS does, or they might not have heard of it, even though it's the s- largest single organization on the planet when it comes to actual dollars being spent. Uh, but now in the second Trump admin, I have to say, I, you know, you're sort of the talk of the town this go around, and you built a, a really, a incredible team of, uh, clinicians, entrepreneurs, healthcare experts, uh, and more that seem to be, um, everywhere all the time. And you're working on a number of very, very highly impactful initiatives. Um, Dr. Oz, I wanna start with you. You were, uh, a very successful TV host. What inspired you to take, uh, on these exceptionally demanding, uh, roles at the service of the president?

Well, thanks for the kind words. Uh, I've always been in the change business, and by that I mean I, I, I love when there are issues we can do better at. And it's true in cardiac surgery, which was, has been a good part of my adult life. I, I knew there were better ways of doing these procedures without having to open someone's chest with a band saw, which seemed archaic, and turns out there are ways now we can change heart valves with catheters you put through vessels in the groin. I invented one of them, started companies that worked in that space. I learned a lot about how to, uh, organize, uh, people, but I also learned a lot about how to take on, uh, entrenched interests, but also change people's minds. 'Cause if you're gonna move from doing traditional surgery to a new version of that same procedure, you gotta get people to think differently about a solution set. Uh, that's one of the reasons I went into media. It wasn't my, uh, vision, and in fact, it wasn't on my vision board at all. My wife Lisa was the one who kept petitioning me, saying that when I would come home and lament the fact that people I had operated on could have avoided my services if they'd just been warned months earlier to change their lifestyle, uh, it would've avoided them needing to have any of these operations. Uh, that got me thinking, well, maybe I should get the word out in a different way. And just to be, you know, blunt about it, the reason America doesn't get the message on health is sometimes it's