The answer to the question about whether it’s appropriate to call one of President-elect Trump’s latest cabinet nominees by his made-for-TV handle “Dr. Oz” is all too obvious: Yes. It’s the same as if, well, “Dr. Phil” had been nominated for postmaster general, or “Oprah” for secretary of state: We don’t know these people, except insofar as we have watched them on reality-television programs. Which is not the same as actual reality at all. We only think we know them. And so we’re going to call them what everyone else calls them, these TV friends of ours. But is Mehmet Cengiz Öz an appropriate nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services? Well, he certainly knows something about Medicare. Until recently, he has been a TV spokesman for the separate, and private, program called Medicare Advantage, extolling the virtues of the company, then encouraging seniors — this is daytime broadcast television — to call the phone number on the screen or visit a website to learn more and enroll. During his ultimately unsuccessful Senate campaign in Pennsylvania two years ago, Oz had to file financial disclosure forms that showed he owned $600,000 worth of stock in Medicare Advantage providers UnitedHealth Group and CVS/Aetna, as well as about $8 million in other investments in big health-care companies. He certainly is a physician, and a professor emeritus of surgery at Columbia University. But he is not a practicing doctor; the 13 seasons of “The Dr. Oz Show,” spun off by Oprah Winfrey’s production company after his many appearances on her own daytime show, put an end to that. In the medical community, he was both respected for his surgical expertise and questioned for extolling some fringe treatments, sometimes for his own profit. He was accused of peddling “fat burners” and “magic” weight-loss pills that were based on pseudo-science, and touted “green-coffee extract” that he later admitted he had no idea of the scientific value of. During the COVID pandemic, he praised the use of discredited chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine during appearances on Fox News shows before those treatments were shown to be both ineffective and dangerous. It has to be said that Oz very much fits into the mold of the TV-proven communicators as opposed to bureaucratic experts who Trump has shown he wants to put atop various government agencies and cabinet-led federal departments. From Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who nominally would be Oz’s boss as health secretary if both end up serving in the new administration — to Fox personality Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, the president-elect clearly values people who look and sound good on TV. Before he was nominated as transportation secretary, former congressman Sean Duffy was also on the 1997 MTV reality series “The Real World: Boston”; met his now-wife on the set of MTV’s “Road Rules: All Stars”; won the Lumberjack World Championships. While many of the nominees don’t have executive-level managerial experience, many of them do, and the multi-millionaire Oz has certainly managed his own finances extremely well. If approved by the Senate, Oz would oversee the agency that provides health insurance coverage to more than 160 million Americans through  Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. It’s clear from his touting of Oz’s nomination what the president-elect is looking for: “to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” When people claim that modern medicine, which has saved so many hundreds of millions of lives, is the problem with human health as opposed to what makes it better, it can be hard to figure out what they are after. It’s taking the populist manifesto and applying it to a matter of science in order to seem on the side of the common man. But Oz in the end is a trained and creative physician. If he can use that lifetime of experience rather than political pressure as his guiding light, he could be effective at making Medicare work better for Americans.