In an Oval Office event on Oct. 16, meant to showcase the Trump administration’s new push to “make IVF affordable for all,” Dr. Mehmet Oz managed to prove that arithmetic is apparently the real endangered science in Washington.
While announcing “discounted” prices on IVF drugs under the Trump administration’s so-called most-favored-nation deal, Oz proudly told reporters that one of the most prescribed drugs in the category, made by MD Serrano, is now “discounted from $242 to $10.” But in trying to boast of the numbers, he turned the moment into a public math emergency. “I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s too high to calculate,” he said. So, basic math is now partisan.
But let’s help the good doctor out: From $242 to $10 is a 95.87%, or approximately 96 percent discount. And it takes less than a fifth-grader’s calculator and approximately two seconds to calculate. The gaffe came after Trump spent several minutes congratulating himself for single-handedly slashing drug costs through his “most-favored-nation” pricing scheme. “We’re ending all of that,” he declared, promising IVF drug prices would drop “400 percent, 200 percent, 600 percent, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before.”
Oz, being a loyal Trump baby, picked up where his boss left off, crediting “persistence from the President” and “middlemen joining the MFN movement.” He also managed to lecture Americans on being “under-babied,” celebrating that “there are going to be a lot of Trump babies.” But the irony, of course, is hard to miss. The same administration that tried to limit reproductive rights is now congratulating itself for discounting the very drugs that make parenthood possible.
Clips of the press event quickly went viral across social media. One user on X joked, “Dr. Oz proving once again that you can be a TV doctor and still fail middle-school math.” Another quipped, “I guess the people running our government must not have access to calculators.” Even the more serious reactions couldn’t resist the irony: “Slashing prices from $242 to $10 proves Big Pharma’s been robbing Americans blind for decades.”
While it is indeed a win if healthcare prices are being cut down from the outrageously high current numbers, there’s another side to this. Trump’s “favored nation” has also caused drug prices to go up in European countries, because, in his own words, “other countries are agreeing to it because if they don’t, we put tariffs on them.” So, a drug that used to cost $88 in London will now cost $150 to align with the U.S. prices.
So, even though Trump announced that the largest fertility drug manufacturer in the world, EMD Serono, has agreed to provide massive discounts to all fertility drugs sold in the U.S., the pharma company is actually doing so by increasing costs all around the world. On top of it, these discounted prices will only be accessible online at trumprx.gov, which he very clearly named to sing his own praises.
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