Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, got himself into a desperate mathematical tangle attempting to defend President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on drug prices on Wednesday.
Appearing on NBC News’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, the former daytime TV personality was invited to watch a montage of Trump making wildly inflated promises on the percentage by which his administration planned to cut the cost of pharmaceuticals, which rose from 1,200 percent to 1,500 percent depending on which press event the president was speaking at.
“Cutting drug prices by 400 percent, anything over 100 percent, wouldn’t that effectively make them free? Is that a realistic goal from the president?” Welker asked Dr Oz.
Strictly speaking, cutting prices by 100 percent would make them free, and any reduction beyond that would put the seller in the nonsensical position of having to pay people to take their product.
Attempting to mount an explanation, the administrator said: “The president does the calculation by saying, ‘OK, if a drug was $100 and you reduce it to $50, it’s 100 percent cheaper because you’re taking $50 off and left with only $50, so the amount you took off the price is equal to the amount that’s left. They’re equal so it’s 100 percent.’”
In fact, reducing a $100 item to $50 would mean it is only 50 percent cheaper.
Pressing on without correcting Oz, the understandably baffled Welker pointed out that Trump has boasted about reducing drug prices by up to 1,500 percent.
“Well, if you take a drug that is $200 or $240 like we did last week and reduce it to $10, those are the numbers you’re talking about,” Oz answered, only intensifying the atmosphere of confusion.
The physician struggled with precisely the same calculation at a White House press conference on October 16, held to promote a new deal on fertility drugs, when he said at one stage in his address: “You’ll notice, President Trump, these are discounted from $242 to $10.
“I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s too high to calculate.”
A reduction from $242 to $10 is 95.87 percent.
The Independent has contacted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for further comment.
Trump was previously accused of engaging in “MAGA math” earlier this year, when a clip of him bragging about bringing down drug prices by 1,400 and 1,500 percent was amended with a Community Note on X that read: “Misleading news. If you reduce price by 100 percent, price becomes zero.”
The note offered a simple example of a 100 percent discount on a $10 book, bringing its price to zero, and linked to a website offering an easy guide to calculating discounts.
