Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when talking about discounts on prescription drug prices, arguing on Wednesday that the president “has a different way of calculating.”
“If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Mr. Kennedy said during a congressional hearing.
Mr. Kennedy is mathematically incorrect. A price reduction from $600 to $10 would be a discount of more than 98 percent. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent, because that would lower the price to zero — or suggest that the company was giving you money for buying the product.
The remark came while Mr. Kennedy was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had asked Mr. Kennedy about the price of Protonix, a prescription drug available on the federally run TrumpRx website, compared with the price of the generic version of the drug at Costco. Ms. Warren pointed out one of many cases in which Americans using the TrumpRx service were still paying much more for drugs.
Ms. Warren took a jab at Mr. Trump’s frequent hyperbolic and mathematically impossible claims that the TrumpRx website offered prescription drugs at discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent. “Which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs,” she said. Mr. Kennedy initially did not address the question on the drug pricing and instead defended Mr. Trump’s bad math.
Mr. Trump has been making mathematically impossible claims about drug pricing for as long as he has been promoting the TrumpRx service, which began with deals announced last year with pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices. He soon lashed out at the media for not repeating the claims or for pointing out that the claims were impossible. “I got the biggest price reduction in history on drugs, pharmaceutical, and I can’t get these guys to talk about it,” he said in January.
Eventually, Mr. Trump began to insert some uncertainty into his claims, saying that the discount depended “on how you want to calculate it.”
“You could say it’s an 80 percent reduction,” Mr. Trump said in January. “Or you could say it’s a 1,000 percent reduction. You could say whatever you want.”
As recently as March 25, Mr. Trump has continued to make false claims about drug prices.
“We have lowered the price of drugs by 50, 60, 70 and 80 and 90 percent,” Mr. Trump said. “And there’s another way of figuring, you could also say, depending on the way you phrased the statement, 400, 500, 600, 700 percent. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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