Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Donald Trump’s faulty calculations on prescription drug prices with some bad math of his own on Thursday.
Previously, Trump has said he would reduce prescription drug prices by “1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” prompting critics to note that this was mathematically impossible.
As HuffPost’s Ed Mazza has explained, “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 attempted to explain Trump’s flawed use of percentages during an Oval Office meeting 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 said. “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.’”
