CBS "Face the Nation" interviews for 2025 races: on Health Care

Mehmet Oz: Save Medicaid despite costs rising due to tariffs

OZ: Let's use a model [for reducing drug costs in the US] that worked for external threats, that's what NATO did. Everyone has to pay a little more. We'll pay extra too. But we won't pay a lot more than everybody else, in this case to an internal threat, which is illness, we'll pay a little less in America that way more Americans can afford these medications and it's a fair system for the entire globe.

Q: At a time when costs are going up?

OZ: Costs are going up, but there's been a 50% increase in the cost of Medicaid over the last five years. So, I'm trying to save this beautiful program, this noble effort to help folks, giving them a hand up. If Medicaid isn't able to take care of the people for whom it was designed, the young children and the seniors, then we're not satisfying the fundamental obligation of a moral government.

Michelle Lujan-Grisham: $50B rural healthcare fund is not nearly enough

LUJAN GRISHAM: I'm going to ask for every dollar the federal government has put aside. So, you've got $50 billion, that's $1 billion for each state if it was even. Do you know how much money it would take to shore up rural hospitals? More than a billion. And to put that in perspective, it's a billion just for behavioral health. It's another billion for prescription drugs. And that's only 50 hospitals. You have hundreds of hospitals, hundreds, 400 rural hospitals across America that will shutter. How do we pick these rural hospitals? And if you pick a southeastern rural hospital in New Mexico, what about the rural hospital in western New Mexico? They are reducing rural healthcare delivery by about $134 billion. So, the $50 billion is just to make someone, somewhere feel like they recognize that this is a disaster.