Donald Trump’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is marching ahead with a plan that would increase denials for people on traditional Medicare -- and pay private, for-profit insurers the money that would otherwise have gone to providing healthcare.

Many of us have dealt for years with the heinous practice of “prior authorizations” – the practice by which health industry staffers overturn the medical judgments of your doctor for the care we need. Dr. Oz now wants to bring that practice into the world of traditional Medicare as a way of preventing people from utilizing the program and “saving” money.

Dr. Oz endorsed a fully privatized, for-profit health system in his failed Senate campaign. Now, as administrator of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Oz is bringing about “reforms” that would help achieve that dangerous goal.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is moving to oppose this change. She, along with Rep. Lloyd Doggett, led a letter with 40 other lawmakers stating:

Giving private for-profit actors a veto over care provided to seniors and people with disabilities in Traditional Medicare, even as a pilot program, opens the door to further erosion of our Medicare system. We therefore strongly urge you to immediately halt the proposed WISeR model and instead consider steps to address the well-documented waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare Advantage program.

Protect traditional Medicare! Sign now to demand that Dr. Oz drop his dangerous Medicare privatization experiment!

Project 2025’s stated goal was to make privatized, for-profit plans the default for Medicare, even though these private plans have been shown to cost more and deliver worse care.

But Dr. Oz and the Trump Administration seem to think the problem with Medicare is that it doesn’t deny enough health care. That’s why this plan would create a “pre-treatment approval process” that would open the door for for-profit insurers to deny certain treatments and then get paid out of Medicare a portion of the “savings” from that denied care.

And what’s worse, private health insurers are relying more and more on AI to determine what is “medically necessary,” likely increasing the number of denials because of an algorithm.

This plan puts corporate profits ahead of care―exactly what Medicare should not do.

Demand Dr. Oz and the Trump Administration reject efforts to privatize Medicare! We must stop Medicare privatization now!

Tell Dr. Oz:

As administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, you have been entrusted with safeguarding the healthcare for millions of seniors. The “pre-treatment approval process” is a dangerous precedent that gives private for-profit actors a veto over care provided to seniors and people with disabilities in Traditional Medicare.

We must protect Medicare, not let greedy, privatized health care corporations get further entangled with it.