Not even Fox News was buying the Trump administration’s nonsense claim that the president has lowered some prescription drug prices by as much as “600 percent.”
Fox anchor John Roberts on Thursday confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about that assertion, which was one of several off-the-mark boasts by the president in his primetime address the night before.
Roberts, 69, noted that what Trump said was “mathematically impossible.”
“If you cut something by 100 percent, the cost goes down to zero. If you cut it by four, five, or six hundred percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their products,” the veteran broadcaster explained as Lutnick chuckled. “So it raises the question: how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?”
Lutnick, like Dr. Mehmet Oz did in October, tried to defend the president—with minimal success.
“What he’s saying is if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13, right? If you’re looking at it from $13, it’s down seven times,” Lutnick said—an analysis that is different than a percentage drop.
Roberts pushed back: “It’s not a 600 percent reduction!”
“Well, but it’s 700 percent higher price before. It’s down 700 percent now, right?” Lutnick, 64, insisted.
“So, $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one. So it all depends how you look at it. You could say it’s down 87 percent,” Lutnick continued, seemingly admitting Trump was fudging the numbers, “or you could say it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same.”
Lutnick then suggested that, exact figures aside, “we all know” what Trump, who coined the term “truthful hyperbole” in his book The Art of the Deal, is saying.
“We are hammering the price of drugs down. That’s what’s happening, and he’s announcing it all the time. He’s got more announcements even between now and the end of the year,” Lutnick said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last month, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, which Oz leads, announced lowered prices for 15 prescription drugs, including weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. Overall savings came out to 44 percent, CMS said. The administration has also announced deals with companies like Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Eli Lilly.
While Trump said Thursday that some prescription drug prices had fallen by “as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent,” in August he pegged the number much higher: 1,500 percent.
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