Dr. Oz Gets Health Insurance Completely Wrong

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, doesn’t understand how health insurance works.

Speaking on Fox News Monday in front of the president’s desolate fairgrounds, Oz presented his proof that the Obamacare marketplace was plagued by fraud—and in the process revealed how little he actually knows about health insurance.

Oz claimed that of 23 million people who were signed up for the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—40 percent of enrollees had never actually used their insurance.

“It raises, again, the reality that there are many people who are signed up who are getting paid for, but don’t believe they have the insurance, don’t know they have insurance, don’t want the insurance,” Oz said.

Of course, that’s not really how health insurance coverage works: Just because you have it doesn’t mean you actually use it. The only “reality” that Oz’s statistics raised was that health care in this country is way too expensive.

“Over 50% of insured Americans struggle to afford seeing a doctor, and 1 in 4 insured Americans skip medical treatments because of out-of-pocket costs,” Melanie D’Arrigo, director of the Campaign for New York Health, wrote on X. “The actual fraud is Americans being price gouged on healthcare.”

Many Americans on Obamacare marketplace plans struggle to pay their deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs, which have surged to record highs in 2026 and increase by more than $1,000 on average year over year. Still, more Americans are now choosing high-deductible plans after Trump stripped essential health care subsidies.

Over the weekend, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration had uncovered more than one million people who were enrolled in Obamacare without Social Security numbers on file. Oz claimed that it was part of a plot by shady insurance agents to enroll unsuspecting—and potentially fake—Americans for Obamacare plans in order to collect “millions of dollars” in improper fees.

“The reality is we have a lot of fake people on the policies. We want them off because they don’t want the insurance, they’re covered elsewhere, or at least they never wanted to be in the program,” Oz told Fox News Saturday.

Neither official has presented any evidence to back up these claims.

President Donald Trump still won’t say whether he’ll sign a bipartisan housing bill that’s coming to his desk Monday, declaring it “a big yawn” compared to his voter suppression bill.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Monday, Trump brushed aside mention of the legislation, which aims to boost housing supply and address affordability issues.

“Big deal. It’s a yawn,” Trump said. “Some people say it’s wonderful. To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn,” Trump said.

The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and a photo ID when voting. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizens voting is incredibly rare. Plus, the bill as written doesn’t have enough support to pass the Senate; making it law before the housing bill, like Trump wants, is essentially impossible.

“I think it’s so unimportant by compared to the SAVE America Act. I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says—it’s saving America from crooked elections. And the housing bill is a bill that can get approved, they worked on it long and hard. It’s very bipartisan—that means the Democrats like it,” Trump said, seemingly insinuating that the bipartisanship of the housing bill was a flaw.

“They’re getting things that I wouldn’t necessarily agree to,” he continued. “Nobody knows more than housing in the history of the presidency, nobody did well like me in housing. I made a lot of money with housing. But when I look at that bill, it’s a bill. But when I look at the SAVE America Act, it’s about saving America,” Trump said, demonstrating his ability to read.

Republicans and Democrats alike are looking to the passage of the housing bill for a pre-midterm reputation boost. Republicans have a lot riding on this in particular. However, it seems like Trump would rather talk about his glory days as a slumlord than help out the vulnerable members of his own party—not to mention the millions of Americans who can’t afford homes.

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected three ballot measures that would have allowed Democrats to redraw the district map in their favor before the 2028 elections, dealing a blow to national party efforts in the gerrymandering race kick-started by President Donald Trump.

The decision blocks Democrats from securing a map that would have likely given them three more seats in the House of Representatives. Under the proposed new map, the only safe Republican district would be that of Representative Lauren Boebert.

The Supreme Court rejected the ballot measures on the basis of the state’s constitutionally mandated “single subject” policy, which requires measures to only handle a single issue.

“Changing long-settled law by modifying the timing, frequency, criteria, and entity responsible for congressional redistricting represents a significant change beyond the proponents’ stated central purposes [of] … congressional redistricting by adopting a new temporary map,” Chief Justice Monica Márquez said in one of her opinions.

Now, Colorado is out of the redistricting wars. So far, the only blue states that have approved a redistricting measure are California and Utah. But the groundwork has been laid for other states to do the same before 2028.

The Department of Government Efficiency may be dead, but its employees are still alive and kicking—and they’ve been quietly rebuilding sensitive federal websites in a way that may violate federal law, The Guardian reports.

The National Design Studio, or NDS, is a governmental agency established via executive order last August, and is full of former DOGE employees. It operates four federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpacounts.gov.

The sites are used for passport applications, getting prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, and voter registration. Until The Guardian contacted NDS about their operations, all four websites ran visitor-tracking software configured to evade traditional privacy tools. And they still don’t have the public filings required by federal privacy laws.

In its investigation, The Guardian also found that NDS’s spending isn’t listed on the federal contract database, making its contracting opaque.

In the meantime, the group is potentially giving the White House access to information about Americans that it normally wouldn’t have: NDS’s passport application site bypasses the State Department’s site. The agency has also built a copy of vote.gov.

Altogether, these sites route sensitive information through a system that the White House apparently controls, and they’re doing it without oversight.

Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb and a Trump supporter, leads the agency, which is staffed by the same hiring authority that ran DOGE. Gebbia was at DOGE himself for six months in the first half of 2025, and at least two other former DOGE staffers work with him: Greg Hogan and Akash Bobba, one of DOGE’s original engineers.

According to The Guardian, several photos and a video on the NDS website also appear to show none other than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the young DOGE-er who allegedly exposed millions of Americans’ Social Security data.

Once again, the Trump administration is giving people with a “move fast and break things” mentality access to incredibly sensitive data on the American people—and seems like it’s trying to do it all in secret.

The chief attraction at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair made people sick on Monday.

One of the events at the country’s semiquincentennial was a pancake-eating competition that had its four participants gagging and heaving after they’d stuffed themselves with the batter-rich flapjacks. An intern at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Douglas Ford, won the competition, though footage of his success didn’t make it look easy.

Fox News noted that the eating contest was made more difficult by a heat wave that has gripped Washington. The conservative network also ironically referred to the all-you-can-eat competition as a celebration of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, in a chyron.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive celebration has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae, a multiweek lineup of music acts had to be canceled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program, and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The state fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the festivities, yet even it is more of a Potemkin village than a sincere reverence. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his “Triumphal Arc” proposal sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “The president is bringing down the mood.”