Dr. Mehmet Oz on Fixing American Healthcare + Fraud | Live from Davos

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back. It's All-In at Davos. My bestie, David Sacks is here. We're having a great time. We're here.

**David Sacks** (0:06)
Can you guys catch this in the background?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:09)
Oh my God.

**David Sacks** (0:09)
Amazing.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:10)
It's stunning.

**David Sacks** (0:10)
This is the Davos experience.

**Mehmet Oz** (0:12)
It looks real.

**David Sacks** (0:13)
I know. Well, it kind of looks like a green screen from here, because this is so picturesque.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:16)
It's literally like a postcard.

**David Sacks** (0:18)
It is. It's a real deal.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:20)
And we'll look over the ledge here, and what you'll see is all of the virtue-signaling ESG, DEI executives, and it's emanating from this entire area, and they put solar over every single building here. None of it's plugged in. It's just for aesthetics, but we're really excited, David and I, to do a bunch of interviews here. Wow. Today we've got a great one for you, and we're going to talk about health, and we're going to talk about the healthcare system with none other than Dr. Mehmet Oz. You're the administrator now for CMS. You've gone from being America's doctor, dare I say, to being a civil servant like my friend, David Sacks. Why did you choose, really, height of your power's career to go into public service like this?

**Mehmet Oz** (1:05)
So I'm in the change business. You guys are as well. And if you're in the change business and the project you're pursuing is not making a significant change, then you want to move on to something else that could make the impact you desire. And especially in healthcare, we don't have the luxury of fooling around for years of our lives, pursuing interests that don't result in meaningfully changing the quality of life, but also the opportunity that the American people have. And so I loved being a TV host, did it for 13 years. I love practicing surgery, which I've done my whole life till recently. This is the best job I've ever had. And it's the best job I've had because of the people that I get to work with, but also because you truly do get to make the change that I desire. I think a lot of folks, the reason they watch the All-In Podcasts is they want to change stuff too. And I encourage everybody to take some big swings and you'll break things once in a while. But if you want to be able to change meaningfully the infrastructure of whatever's bothering you, you got to go at a full speed. And this administration offers us a unique opportunity to do that.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:10)
It is interesting, David. You were used to going at a pretty fast pace as well. And then I think our expectation was, hey, you get into public service. It's going to be about consensus building. And it's going to take a lot of time. Say what you will about Trump. Some people might not agree with every policy. But he ships. He's like a founder who ships and ships product fast. That's also been your experience.

**David Sacks** (2:31)
He's hard to keep up with. I mean, he moves incredibly fast and it makes him really fun to work for because he wants to get things done. Every day he wants to get things done.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:41)
There's a sense of urgency.

**David Sacks** (2:42)
Yeah. And you'll be in a meeting with the president in the Oval Office and you'll tell him about a problem. His first instinct is to pick up the phone and call and fix it right then and there. And he does that meeting after meeting, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. And when you compound that desire to get things done and he acts on it right there, it has a huge impact.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:02)
And he seems to get great pleasure in bringing together, especially in this administration, which I think is distinctly different than the first. First administration, he was new to politics, and he brought in a lot of career politicians that I think maybe people told him were the right people. This time, he has explicitly gone and looked for people with expertise who are proven winners in the field, yourself included.

**Mehmet Oz** (3:26)
He wants us to carry the water. I think across the different parts of the administration, he wants individuals that don't have to rely on the president to tell the story all the time.
Because so much of the narrative that is reflected in the media is just completely off. I might have been saying that they're doing it on purpose. They literally don't understand some of the secondary and tertiary impacts of the decisions you're making. And it's our job to therefore tell, not just the media, but the American people, what we're trying to do. And that's especially important if you're unorthodox in how you govern. And this is a fundamentally important reality, at least at CMS. David, I don't know how it is in the developing AI way. There probably wasn't a rule book before anyway. But in health care, there have been doctors since the dawn of... But since humans left Africa 50,000 years ago, there were doctors in the encampment. And so there is a way of doing things. And in government, that exists as well. But it's not always the right way to do things. So for example, we have the ability to make laws. Every part of the administration pretty much can. We get Congress to do stuff. It doesn't always turn out the way you want it to turn out. And it takes a lot of time. And the negotiated final result sometimes falls short. You have rulemaking, second big area, which is administrative entities like ours can break the rules that everyone has to follow. We're going to pay you this much. We're not going to let these people do that anymore. It does take some time. And it's prone to lawfare. By that I mean the people you're regulating, if they don't like what you're saying, they can sue you and they can stop you. And in this administration, if the other party doesn't like what you're doing, even if it's the best thing, we had a rule that would reduce fraud. But the blue cities didn't like it because it was coming from someone they didn't like, the president, so they enjoined it, and that's now caught up in court. Now, we'll win, but it could take years. So that's the second big way, right? So you make laws, you pass rules. The third way, which historically government has not used, I don't think as effectively as possible, and this president, because he's a great negotiator, is able to push us in ways that historically not been done, is to just use the power to convene. The US government can bring people together who would not normally talk. They can give safe harbor to industry to come together and discuss problems that historically they would try away with.