Mehmet Oz met with city officials in Kensington and defended Medicaid cuts in swing through Philadelphia

City officials met with Mehmet Oz in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood Monday to advocate for protecting Medicaid from cuts proposed by congressional Republicans advancing a bill that would reduce spending on the government-funded health coverage.

Oz, President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed administrator for the nation‘s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, defended the planned reductions, which would cut billions of dollars from Medicaid, a safety-net program for low-income people and those with disabilities.

Oz, then a celebrity doctor with a syndicated daytime television show, drew national attention when he visited Kensington in 2017 with his TV crew to show the opioid crisis in the neighborhood.

After his episode aired, the city cleared a long-standing encampment where people had sold and used drugs, a decision that some claim further destabilized the neighborhood. He visited again in 2022 during his unsuccessful campaign for Senate, walking along the perimeter of McPherson Square as news cameras trailed him.

Chief Deputy Mayor Vanessa Garrett Harley said officials requested to meet with Oz on Monday once they knew he would be in town. The goal was to show him how “vitally important” Medicaid and Medicare, a government health program serving seniors, are to Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s efforts to combat addiction.

Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel and Public Safety Director Adam Geer joined Oz on the tour, along with Ala Stanford, the founder of the Black Doctors Consortium.

“The group walked along a portion of Kensington Avenue with Dr. Oz to see conditions there firsthand,” Garrett Harley said, calling it “a productive intergovernmental conversation.”

Stanford said that she spoke with Oz about the Riverview Wellness Village, the Parker administration-funded recovery housing complex where she manages the medical suite. Most residents at the facility, which has nearly 400 beds, rely on Medicaid and Medicare to fund their care.

“I told him we can‘t operate without Medicaid and Medicare, because our patients run from 19 to over 65. This is real for us,” she said.

Oz asked what CMS could do to help programs like hers, Stanford said. She replied that the federal government could consider covering housing programs like Riverview for people with substance use disorder through Medicaid, as stable housing can offer patients stability and protection against relapsing.

She said Oz was receptive and said he would like to come back to the city to visit the program. “It was an opportunity to present a solution, to be able to discuss what we’re doing in real time,” Stanford said. “For the CMS administrator to hear us talk about it and say he’s interested in coming back to see it was a win.”

During his visit, Oz said he spoke to first responders who had tended to overdoses and in a statement called the situation “a tragedy doused in misfortune wrapped around countless broken hearts.”

Oz said he met with an ambulance driver who has used Narcan to reverse lethal overdoses, pastor Buddy Osborn, founder of Rock Ministries, as well as Bethel and patrol officers.

“CMS will focus on the challenges of this homeless population...and hopes to work with powerful local groups like Community Behavioral Health who support the Medicaid population,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Oz spoke to anchors on FOX 29’s Good Day Philadelphia, where he defended planned changes to Medicaid, which he argued would streamline the program to focus on the most vulnerable beneficiaries.

“The question for us as a nation — this is a bipartisan issue — is: How do you take care of the most vulnerable?” Oz said on Good Day, discussing his plans to visit Kensington.

“Well, you certainly don‘t cut Medicare and Medicaid,” host Mike Jerrick said to Oz.

“We will not cut Medicaid,” Oz maintained.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the House Republican plan as it stands would result in 7.6 million Americans losing Medicaid health insurance over 10 years. The cuts would help cover the cost of extending tax breaks Trump instituted in his first term.

Oz said the program has grown massively in the last five years and argued it is susceptible to fraud, claiming there are ample cases of people collecting in multiple states. He argued eligible recipients and those who adhere to new requirements, if implemented, would not be impacted by the changes.

“We have not policed the program well,” Oz said.

In Pennsylvania, Medicaid enrollment increased during the COVID-19 pandemic because the federal government stopped requiring patients to confirm their eligibility for the program every year. In the last year, as eligibility checks have resumed, statewide enrollment in Medicaid has declined by more than 700,000 people.

Some of those patients were no longer eligible for the program because they found new employment, but many people who are still eligible lost coverage because they did not properly complete paperwork to reenroll.

Democratic state lawmakers and health providers from around the Philadelphia region warned last week that billions of dollars in Republican-proposed Medicaid cuts would devastate their constituents, especially Black patients who disproportionately rely on the program, and health providers who serve high numbers of Medicaid patients. Those include some of the major health systems in the area, like Temple Health, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, and Children‘s Hospital of Philadelphia.

» READ MORE: Pa. hospitals with a lot of Medicaid patients keep closing. Budget cuts would speed up the trend.

Critics of work requirements for Medicaid, proposed as part of the bill, have noted that most people covered through the program already work. In Arkansas, one of the few states that instituted a work requirement under the previous Trump administration, research has suggested that the measure kept eligible patients from getting Medicaid because of confusion over the new rules.

Debate is ongoing in the House this week over controversial changes to the federal share of Medicaid payments. House Republicans are looking for compromises that please both conservatives looking for deeper cuts and moderates wary of the blowback should people lose coverage.

Oz said in the television interview that he had plans to visit the CMS regional office in Philadelphia and an elder-care facility. He said he was in town over the weekend for his grandson‘s first birthday party and told the anchors he lives “in Philadelphia” but has spent less time here recently because of his role in Washington.

The celebrity doctor and former TV host lived in New Jersey for decades and bought a home in Bryn Athyn during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate run.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional comment.