Jennifer Kiggans

VIRGINIA BEACH — U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans stood beside Dr. Mehmet Oz on Friday morning as the two backed recent health initiatives by the Trump administration.

Oz, the former talk-show host and Senate candidate who now heads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, joined Kiggans for a campaign event at the Virginia Beach campus of Tidewater Community College. They touted a $122 million federal investment they said would expand rural healthcare assess in Virginia.

Oz and Kiggans also told reporters they believed the voices of parents matter when asked for their reaction to the state health department’s stance on vaccines following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month calling for a reevaluation of childhood immunization schedules.

Both spoke in support of what they called the Working Families Tax Cuts passed last year, which reorganized Medicaid users’ access and funding for the federal program, cutting around $1 trillion that would’ve funded it over the following decade. Kiggans voted to pass the act. Oz said those tens of millions were headed towards healthcare programs that benefit rural Virginians, who experts last year noted were some of the most at risk after the legislation, what Trump called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” became law.

“The legalized money laundering that was allowing some states to suck immense amounts of resources out of the federal funds for Medicaid has been slowed and generally stopped. Now I’ve got some bad news for you if you’re in Virginia, because Virginia is not the A-team when it comes to legalized money laundering,” Oz said. “There are other states that are really, really top tier at getting money out of the federal government, like California.”

He continued, saying in California illegal immigrants had received free predental and vision care.

“Medicaid needed to be saved,” Kiggans said. “This was a government-funded healthcare program that was going to fall off a cliff.”

Oz credited Kiggans with ushering the $122 million investment announced Friday. Kiggans said there was more work to be done in the realm of making healthcare and prescription drugs more affordable.

Details on how the money would be used or when it would arrive in Virginia were not immediately available.

Oz appeared in the commonwealth’s second district for a series of healthcare facility visits, which included a tour of Sentara Princess Anne Hospital. He and Kiggans met with local leaders and healthcare officials at a roundtable thereafter.

During the roundtable — which was closed to the press — they spoke about the impacts of the Rural Health Transformation Program, which was created by the Working Families Tax Cuts. A statement from the congresswoman’s office said they discussed how Virginia is expected to receive over $189 million a year for the next five years to expand telehealth and virtual care options through the program.

The representative’s staff then invited reporters for a briefing. Kiggans was asked for her reaction to Trump’s executive order that demanded a lengthening of immunization timelines and how that meshed with the Virginia Department of Health’s unwavering stance — that its medical professionals reaffirmed its standing recommendations to children’s vaccine timelines.

She said she believed in the effectiveness of vaccines, but also that parents were justified in feeling concerned with the volume of injections their children were receiving at such an early age. Kiggans said just as parents had a right to have a say in their child’s education, they should have a right to have a say in their child’s healthcare.

“We’re not saying vaccines don’t matter, you don’t need to get vaccines,” she said. “We’re saying, ‘Do we need to give it to newborn infants right away, so many at one time?’ ”

Oz said parents have a right to decide what was best for their children. He said they were right to feel wary of the “overreach from public health authorities” he described as taking place during the pandemic.

“I couldn’t be a stauncher supporter of looking at things like a vaccine schedule to make sure that parents have a say as well,” Kiggans said.

John Buzbee, 757-879-7421, [email protected]