Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when speaking about discounts on prescription drug prices, arguing on Wednesday that the president “has a different way of calculating.”
“If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Mr. Kennedy mentioned throughout a congressional listening to.
Mr. Kennedy is mathematically incorrect. A value discount from $600 to $10 could be a reduction of greater than 98 %. A value low cost can’t be greater than 100%, as a result of that may decrease the value to zero — or recommend that the corporate was supplying you with cash for getting the product.
The comment got here whereas Mr. Kennedy was testifying earlier than the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had requested Mr. Kennedy in regards to the value of Protonix, a prescription drug accessible on the federally run TrumpRx web site, in contrast with the value of the generic version of the drug at Costco. Ms. Warren identified one in all many instances wherein Americans utilizing the TrumpRx service have been nonetheless paying much more for drugs.
Ms. Warren took a jab at Mr. Trump’s frequent hyperbolic and mathematically unimaginable claims that the TrumpRx web site supplied pharmaceuticals at reductions of 400 to 1,500 %. “Which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs,” she mentioned. Mr. Kennedy initially didn’t deal with the query on the drug pricing and as a substitute defended Mr. Trump’s unhealthy math.
Mr. Trump has been making mathematically unimaginable claims about drug pricing for so long as he has been selling the TrumpRx service, which started with deals announced last year with pharmaceutical corporations to scale back some drug costs. He quickly lashed out on the media for not repeating the claims or for mentioning that the claims have been unimaginable. “I got the biggest price reduction in history on drugs, pharmaceutical, and I can’t get these guys to talk about it,” he mentioned in January.
Eventually, Mr. Trump started to insert some uncertainty into his claims, saying that the low cost depended “on how you want to calculate it.”
“You could say it’s an 80 percent reduction,” Mr. Trump mentioned in January. “Or you could say it’s a 1,000 percent reduction. You could say whatever you want.”
As not too long ago as March 25, Mr. Trump has continued to make false claims about drug costs.
“We have lowered the price of drugs by 50, 60, 70 and 80 and 90 percent,” Mr. Trump mentioned. “And there’s another way of figuring, you could also say, depending on the way you phrased the statement, 400, 500, 600, 700 percent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
