RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Erroneous Drug Price Claims With More Bad Math | EUROtoday

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Donald Trump’s defective calculations on prescription drug costs with some dangerous math of his personal on Thursday.

Previously, Trump has stated he would cut back prescription drug costs by “1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” prompting critics to notice that this was mathematically inconceivable.

As HuffPost’s Ed Mazza has defined“Reducing the price by 100% would make the drugs free. Reducing it by ‘1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,’ as Trump said, would make the cost negative dollars ― with the drug company essentially paying people to take the medication.”

Kennedy tried to clarify Trump’s flawed use of percentages throughout an Oval Office assembly on Thursday.

A Democrat senator “was ridiculing President Trump for his math, and she was saying it’s mathematically impossible to have any drug drop by 600% cost, which he had claimed,” Kennedy stated. “I said, ‘Well, if the drug was $100 and it raised the price to $600, that would be a 600% rise. Well, if it drops from $600 to $100, that’s a 600% savings.’”

Both of these calculations are inaccurate.

If a drug’s value had been to go from $100 to $600, that might be a $500 uptick, or a 500% improve. If a drug’s value had been to go from $600 to $100, that might be a $500 low cost, or roughly 83% in financial savings.

Kennedy’s assertion successfully endorsed Trump’s incorrect interpretation of percentages, an method the HHS official characterised as a “mathematical device.”

On Wednesday, Kennedy used the same clarification when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed him about Trump’s drug value statements throughout a Senate listening to.

“President Trump has a different way of calculating … there’s two ways of calculating percentage. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction,” Kennedy stated. As commentators famous, that quantity of financial savings would really symbolize a roughly 98% discount, not 600% as he prompt.

Trump made the identical level on Thursday as nicely.

“There are two ways of calculating it, but either way, it doesn’t make any difference,” he stated, “Whether it’s 60, 70, or 80% nobody’s ever heard of it. But it’s also 500, 600, 700, depending on the way you want to look at it, the way you word the calculation.”

Kennedy and Trump’s statements come because the administration has sought to advertise its makes an attempt to slash prescription drug costs. The Oval Office occasion on Thursday centered on a deal Trump had made with the biotech firm Regeneron that concerned drug value reductions for some Americans, together with tariff aid for the company.

This previous February, the administration additionally launched the TrumpRx web site, which it’s pitched as a manner to assist shoppers buy lower-cost medicine immediately. The platform has been scrutinized, nevertheless, for the restricted variety of medicine on it and the truth that cheaper generic options can be found for a lot of of those medicine elsewhere.