President Donald Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, lashed out at a reporter who grilled him over healthcare cuts caused by Republicans’ massive “Big Beautiful Bill.”
“My colleague just got back from North Dakota, which has three-fourths of the rural hospital deserts, and they found that women there trying to deliver a baby had to drive up to two hours to get to a hospital,” Gray Media’s Molly Martinez pressed Oz in an interview posted on Wednesday.
“How are we in a system in which that is the case? What are you doing so that women don’t have to face that?” she asked the Trump official and former talk show host.
After Oz answered that “there wasn’t much financial compensation” for people to work in rural areas, Martinez replied that “there was money there, so this seems to be a solution to a problem that the administration may have created.”
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law last year, significantly reduced federal health care spending, and experts predict that some rural hospitals will be forced to shut down as a result.
“The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ cut $137 billion in rural healthcare spending. There was money there,” Martinez said. ”So this seems to be a solution to a problem the administration may have created.”
“You’re repeating talking points that are not only wrong but deliberately duplicitous,” Oz fired back. “That number is incorrect. That’s not how much money got taken from rural institutions. That is a talking point from industry.”
Oz then touted the Rural Health Transformation Program, which set aside $50 billion for rural health programs over five years to offset Republicans’ cuts to health care.
But Martinez pushed back that the program is only “$50 billion you’re putting into a system that you just robbed of $137 billion.”
“That is incorrect and dishonest and deliberately duplicative— duplicitous,” Oz fumed.
Citing findings from the Congressional Budget Office, among others, Martinez told Oz, “There are plenty of people working to show the damage that this is doing to rural healthcare, and the people are the ones that are dying on the way to the hospital that’s two hours away.”
Eventually Oz acknowledged that yes, there was money “correctly taken out” of Medicaid that was “basically legalized money laundering” and was “going to bankrupt the system.”
“We didn’t cut anything,” he later added. ”What are you talking about with the word ‘cut’? You keep using that word. Please use your words carefully. You’re a journalist.”