RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when speaking about discounts on prescription drug pricesarguing 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 reduction value can’t be greater than one hundred pc, as a result of that might decrease the value to zero — or recommend that the corporate was providing 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 Protonixa prescription drug obtainable on the federally run TrumpRx web site, in contrast with the value of the generic version of the drug at Costco. Ms. Warren identified considered one of many circumstances wherein Americans utilizing the TrumpRx service had been nonetheless paying much more for drugs.
Ms. Warren took a jab at Mr. Trump’s frequent hyperbolic and mathematically not possible claims that the TrumpRx web site provided 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 tackle the query on the drug pricing and as a substitute defended Mr. Trump’s dangerous math.
Mr. Trump has been making mathematically not possible claims about drug pricing for so long as he has been selling the TrumpRx service, which started with deals announced last year with pharmaceutical firms to cut back some drug costs. He quickly lashed out on the media for not repeating the claims or for stating that the claims had been not possible. “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 relies upon “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.”
