Dr. Mehmet Oz struggled to get his words out as he tried to defend a Trump administration plan to inject money into rural hospitals.
In an interview with Molly Martinez of Gray Media’s Washington News Bureau, Oz, Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was grilled about the rural health fund, which is due to distribute $50 billion in grants to rural hospitals over the next four years.
As Martinez pointed out, the plan arrived after Donald Trump’s flagship Big Beautiful spending bill, which will cut an estimated $137 billion in federal Medicaid spending in rural areas over the next 10 years.
“There was money there, so this seems to be a solution to a problem that the administration may have created,” Martinez said.
Oz slightly stammered while accusing Martinez of “repeating talking points that are not only wrong but deliberately duplicitous.”
Oz added that the $137 billion figure is a “talking point from industry,” with independent health policy research organization KFF among those estimating Trump’s bill would drastically cut federal Medicaid funding to rural areas.
“When I give Medicaid dollars on behalf of the taxpayers to a state, the question is how much of it dribbles down to rural healthcare,” Oz said.
“In reality, the people who run the big hospitals and big systems in the big cities and their lobbyists have better access to the governor of the state. They get to direct where that money goes, so it stays stuck in the big cities. It never trickles down to rural America.
“The $50 billion we’re putting into rural healthcare system is a 50-percent increase over the amount of money we put into Medicaid in those systems from last year,” Oz added, while once again stumbling over his words. “It’s the biggest increase ever.”
The widening disparity between healthcare access in rural and urban areas—including lack of easy access to hospitals and primary care—has caused a severe crisis in the country.
In 2024, the American Medical Association (AMA) estimated that death rates for the 46 million Americans who live in rural areas are around 20 percent higher than those of those who live in cities. The imbalance will also have an outsized impact on the GOP, with rural voters being a key Republican demographic in any election cycle.
Martinez grilled Oz further on his claims and suggested that the Trump administration is merely putting $50 billion into a system “that you just robbed of $137 billion.”
A stammering Oz once again suggested Martinez was being “incorrect and dishonest and deliberately duplicative, um, duplicitous.”
“My sources here are the Center for American Progress, it’s the Congressional Budget Office,” Martinez fired back. “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.”
Martinez shared a clip of her interview with the top Trump ally on X Wednesday, adding: “Things got heated today with Dr. Oz.”
