Butter for $1 🤣 🤣 🤣: Dr. Oz Holds Up the Evidence for the Camera, and His Own Network Proves Him Wrong

Mehmet Oz, television doctor and now head of the U.S. agency for Medicare and Medicaid, wanted to prove Monday night that he understands the concerns of ordinary people. He had brought props specifically for that, a stick of butter and a bag of peanuts, as proof of how close he is to everyday life. He held the butter up to the camera. “In America, something like this costs about a dollar,” he said. Host Laura Ingraham did not even let him finish. “Where are you shopping? It’s not a dollar, it’s more like four.” The fact that the correction came from the very network that otherwise rarely contradicts Trump’s people made the whole scene complete.

Dr. Oz: “We went grocery shopping. Butter in America is about a buck.” Laura Ingraham: “Where are you shopping? It’s not a buck.”

Laura Ingraham: „Wo kaufst du denn ein? Sie kostet keinen Dollar.“

Oz geriet ins Rudern. Er habe die Butter gerade erst gekauft, also liege er doch nah dran. Dann kam der Einfall des Abends: „Vielleicht wird sie ja schlecht.“ Ein Stück Butter, vor laufender Kamera für die Unkenntnis seines Käufers haftbar gemacht. Als senkte der Handel den Preis, weil die Ware altert, als hingen die fehlenden drei Dollar am Haltbarkeitsdatum. Das US-Arbeitsministerium führt den Preis bei rund vier Dollar. Ein Mann mit dem Vermögen von Oz hat freilich keinen Anlass, sich so etwas zu merken.

The offer did not take long. Craig Beam, former chairman of the American Heart Association, offered online to fly to Washington at his own expense and visit at least 20 stores with Oz. They would not stop until the doctor found butter somewhere for $1 a pound. He would bring a camera crew along too. A bet against reality that only someone makes who never meets reality at the checkout. Oz has not accepted it to this day, and one can guess why.

This is not new. In 2022, during his failed campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania, Oz complained in a video about the price of raw vegetables and shopped at “Wegner’s,” a store that does not even exist. He had apparently made up the name, and the prices along with it. Clueless then, clueless now, except that today he makes decisions about the health of millions.

That is how you recognize this administration. People who claim they feel the pain at the checkout and do not know what a stick of butter costs. A doctor who got rich on television holds up other people’s lives as a prop and cannot even get the price right. The same man who misses the price of butter by a factor of four is supposed to decide what kind of treatment a country can still afford. This indifference will cost people more than any stick of butter ever could.