Trump’s New Medicaid Chief Has Boneheaded Idea to Lower Drug Costs

Dr. Mehmet Oz made a particularly useless comment Friday, after being sworn in as Donald Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“It is your patriotic duty, I’ll say it again, the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves because it is important for serving in the military, but it is also important because healthy people don’t consume health care resources,” Oz said during a ceremony at the White House.

“The best way to reduce drug spending is to use less drugs ’cause you don’t need them, ’cause you’re healthy. And it feels a lot better, as well.”

Oz’s suggestion that Americans stay healthy is so simple, it might just be work—oh wait, no!

The health care programs that Oz now oversees provide coverage for about half of the U.S. population. During his confirmation hearing, Oz refused to say that he would oppose cuts to Medicaid that Trump and Republicans are intending to force through in order to fund an extension on the president’s 2017 tax plan.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order promising to lower drug prices, but in fact handed a huge win to pharmaceutical companies, which will be permitted to set their own drug prices for an additional four years before they can be reduced as part of Medicare’s negotiation program.

Behind Oz stood Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who is spearheading the administration’s efforts to “Make America Healthy Again”—and folding his crusade against conventional medicine into the government’s health recommendations.

After Donald Trump has spent months promising to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just admitted that might not be possible.

“So we came here yesterday to sort of, begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end a war,” Rubio told reporters Friday in Paris, where he met with European and Ukrainian officials. “To try to figure out very soon—and I’m talking about a matter of days—not a matter of weeks, whether or not this is a war that can be ended.… If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that it’s not going to happen, then I think the president’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, ‘Well, we’re done.’”

A reminder: Before he was elected, Trump said he would have the war “settled in one day.”

But in his first three months as president, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have done little to help the situation. They’ve instead cut millions in military aid to Ukraine and berated the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for his supposed lack of allegiance to the United States.

The Trump administration is discovering that putting a stop to Europe’s largest war in decades is harder than it thought, and it’s growing impatient.

“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end,” Rubio told reporters. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable. If it is, we’re in, if it’s not, we have other things to focus on as well.”

The president echoed Rubio’s message from the White House Friday, telling reporters he wants to “get it done.”

“People are dying. We’re gonna get it stopped ideally now,” Trump said before flipping the script. “If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just gonna say, You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass, but hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

Both Rubio and Trump clearly think it’s time to move onto more important things; there are visas to revoke and citizens to deport.

Donald Trump revoked a U.S. citizen’s Social Security benefits in the hopes he would leave the country.

A man who became a naturalized citizen shortly before Trump took office received a letter on February 13 from the Social Security Administration informing him that he was losing his Social Security and Medicare benefits, The Bulwark reported Friday.

“We cannot pay you benefits because you are not lawfully present in the U.S.,” the letter obtained by The Bulwark reads. The man’s English-speaking family appealed the letter, reversing the decision, but his case is yet another reminder that the president isn’t afraid to weaponize the federal programs in his war on immigrants … or really anybody he wants out of the country.

Last week, multiple news outlets reported that the Trump administration entered the names of more than 6,000 immigrants into the SSA’s “death master file,” stripping them of their legal ability to work and receive benefits in the U.S. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to claim federal safety net programs are rampant with fraudulent information, such as incorrect death dates.)

“This is an outrageous abuse of power. It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people,” Nancy Altman, the president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works said in a statement. “Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more.… When Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives.”

The Bulwark’s report comes as Trump takes his deportation threats to a new level. The Department of Homeland Security is sending letters to U.S.-born immigration attorneys telling them to leave the country immediately, and last week, Trump mused about the possibility of sending American citizens to megaprisons in El Salvador, a stark reminder the president will stop at nothing to rid the country of his adversaries.

Donald Trump is once again sourcing administration officials from the talent pool at Fox News.

The president announced Thursday night that he had formed a “revamped” Homeland Security Advisory Council, including the likes of Fox News host Mark Levin and former Fox News contributor Bo Dietl.

The council would also include South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster and Florida state Senator Joseph Gruters, who serves on the Republican National Committee and is a close ally of Trump’s.

“Under Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s leadership, HSAC will work hard on developing new Policies and Strategies that will help us secure our Border, deport Illegal Criminal Thugs, stop the flow of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs that are killing our Citizens, and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

It’s not exactly clear how the “revamped” group will differ from past iterations of HSAC, which has been a fixture of administrations since George W. Bush announced its creation in 2002, to generate counterterrorism strategy and oversee a reorganized department.

Joe Biden’s iteration of the same group had a whopping 33 members, from the private sector and law enforcement groups—but none from TV. The DHS website, which was last updated in January, lists no current members of the group.

Trump has been known to tune into Levin’s show Life, Liberty & Levin, where the ultraconservative attacks the president’s enemies and regularly makes recommendations for his administration. Now he will make those same recommendations in an official capacity.

In November, Levin suggested to border czar Tom Homan that the Trump administration should withhold federal funding from states that failed to comply with its draconian immigration policies. Levin was once described by Rolling Stone as a “bomb-throwing Trump sycophant.”

Bo Dietl is a former detective with the New York Police Department and actor, who served as a contributor on Fox News until 2016, when he it was revealed that he’d been hired to dig up dirt on Andrea Mackris and Gretchen Carlson in an attempt to discredit their sexual harassment allegations against former Fox CEO Roger Ailes.

The State Department under Marco Rubio seems to think little of human rights and seeks to change the term’s definition.

NPR reports that the department will no longer include criticisms of poor prison conditions, government corruption, or political processes that are restrictive, in its reports on international human rights. That means government repression, such as restricting peaceful assembly or preventing free and fair elections, will no longer be documented by the agency.

The news outlet cited an editing memo and other documents showing that department employees have been ordered to “streamline” the reports to meet the minimum legal requirements. State Department reports are required by law to be a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights” for every country.

The reports are usually released every year in March or April, and 2024’s reports were completed this year in January but are now being re-edited by the Trump administration, delaying them until May, sources in the department told NPR. Last month, Politico reported that references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as violence and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, would be removed from the reports.

Some of the changes appear to reflect the Trump administration’s foreign relationships. For example, the report on El Salvador had its section on prison conditions erased, raising questions as to whether the administration’s deal with the country to send undocumented immigrants to Salvadoran prisons, which are accused of flagrant human rights abuses, had something to do with it.

The report on Hungary, whose President Viktor Orbán enjoys high esteem from President Trump and many leading conservatives, had its section on “Corruption in Government” crossed out. Orbán has restricted press freedoms and civil liberties in the country. Experts say that the changes to the reports will undermine the State Department’s credibility.

“You can’t overstate the value in the real world of the annual State Department human rights reports being credible and impartial,” said Christopher Le Mon, who worked in the agency’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor until January.

“You also can’t overstate the damage it will do to that credibility if the Trump administration’s edits are seen to diminish—not just the scope of what are defined as human rights, but also if those edits are seen to play favorites,” Le Mon added.

The Trump administration has already been disregarding human rights here in the U.S., whether it’s the lack of due process in its mass deportation efforts, its use of El Salvador’s questionable prisons to house deported immigrants (or possibly soon U.S. citizens), its use of masked, plainclothes officers to grab people off the street, its restrictions on the press, or its attacks on academic freedom or many other actions. Maybe the administration is realizing it can’t speak credibly when it comes to basic rights and freedoms.