Dr. Mehmet Oz left jaws on the floor at the White House this week, unveiling a startling new buzzword to describe what he says is one of the gravest threats facing the United States: Americans, he warned, have become “under-babied.”
The eyebrow-raising phrase came as President Trump signed his moms.gov executive order, with the 17th Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services standing alongside him to deliver a sobering demographic warning. Oz cited a U.S. fertility rate that has cratered to 1.5 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to sustain the population, even as rural communities continue to grapple with a worsening maternal mortality crisis.
The pitch for a national baby boom landed awkwardly for critics who note that the same administration’s signature reconciliation bill cuts an estimated $911 billion in federal Medicaid spending over 10 years — slashing the very safety net that pregnant women and new mothers in rural America rely on. Medicaid finances roughly four in 10 births in the United States, and the bulk of those births occur in the same communities seeing labor and delivery units shutter at a record clip.
A Showman With a $1.7 Trillion Portfolio
Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon turned daytime television star, was confirmed after a March 14, 2025 hearing before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and began leading CMS on April 10, 2025. He now sits on a $1.7 trillion budget — nearly double that of the Department of Defense — overseeing coverage for more than 160 million Americans across Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Born in Cleveland to Turkish immigrant parents and raised in Delaware, Oz holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a joint M.D.-M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and emeritus status at Columbia. He has long been a polarizing figure in medicine. He was called before Congress in 2014 for promoting deceptive weight-loss products on his television show, and he has a history of touting medical treatments that lack scientific evidence. He also ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022.
“150 million people know who he is,” former CMS chief Tom Scully, who ran the agency under President George W. Bush and is now a partner at private equity firm Welsh Carson, said before Oz’s confirmation. “When he says something, people pay attention.”
The Fraud Crusade Hits Snags
People are paying attention — and the numbers haven’t always added up. On March 3, 2026, Oz posted a video accusing New York state of running a fraud-ridden Medicaid program, claiming that 5 million beneficiaries had received personal care services. The actual number was closer to 450,000, off by a factor of more than 10. The Trump administration acknowledged the error on April 10, 2026.
Personal care services in New York are not frivolous handouts, critics of Oz’s framing stress. The program provides clinically necessary support — bathing, dressing, eating, transferring from bed to wheelchair — for people who would otherwise be institutionalized. The average annual cost of personal care in New York is $32,951 per person, compared with $56,082 for nursing home care.
In a USA Today opinion piece published April 27, 2026, physician Dr. Tyler Evans accused Oz of constructing a caricature of the program to soften the public on cuts, pointing to Oz’s description of services that help patients “do something that our families would normally do for us, like carrying groceries.”
Minnesota Standoff and Premium Shock
The flashpoint isn’t only New York. In January 2026, Oz declared Minnesota’s Medicaid program in “substantial noncompliance” with federal fraud requirements. CMS deferred $259.5 million in Minnesota Medicaid funding and threatened to withhold more than $2 billion — roughly 18% of the state’s federal Medicaid dollars. It was the first time in Medicaid’s 60-year history that Washington had pulled that lever against a state.
Minnesota responded by filing a federal lawsuit accusing the administration of weaponizing Medicaid as “political punishment.” The audits CMS cited as the basis for its action, critics note, were at least five years old.
Meanwhile, the 23 million enrollees of the ACA marketplaces — a figure Oz has publicly called “too high” — are absorbing a brutal price shock. Premium subsidies expired on December 31, 2025, and average ACA premiums jumped roughly 114%. That collision of skyrocketing premiums, Medicaid retrenchment, and a maternal health crisis is creating a fault line that critics say cuts directly through the rural communities Oz now urges to have more babies.
“Under-Babied” Meets a Shrinking Safety Net
The moms.gov executive order, administration officials say, is intended to centralize maternal and family resources online and encourage family formation. But health policy experts warn that exhortations to procreate ring hollow when obstetric wards are closing, Medicaid eligibility is tightening, and Affordable Care Act coverage is becoming dramatically more expensive.
STAT News reporter Tara Bannow, who profiled Oz before his confirmation, has said the administrator is unlikely to push back against the political winds of the moment. Scully has argued Oz’s warm relationship with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Trump could give him outsized influence to shape policy from within.
For now, the “under-babied” line is the message Americans are hearing — even as the people Oz is asking to have more children stare down a steeper climb to afford the care they already need.
