President Donald Trump’s claims about prescription drug prices make no mathematical sense. But his team – including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week – keeps straining to defend them.
Since last year, Trump has asserted that he has cut or will cut prescription drug prices by numbers like “500%,” “600%,” “1,000%,” “1,400%” and “1,500%.” That is mathematically impossible, as CNN and others have repeatedly noted. A decline of 100% would mean drugs had become cost-free, so a decline of hundreds of percent or more would mean Americans would be getting paid substantial money to acquire their medications.
That isn’t happening. But this is the “President Trump is right” administration, in which Trump’s aides and appointees often stretch to defend even his most laughably inaccurate claims. And so, even after lots of fact-checks and online jokes about Trump’s fictional percentages – and even after Trump has implicitly made clear he is aware these numbers are being challenged – his allies have tried to portray them as reasonable.
Here are three attempts they have made since the fall.
The most recent effort came from Kennedy on Wednesday and Thursday. Kennedy used bad math to try to justify Trump’s bad math.
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren mentioned Trump’s claims about “600%” reductions in drug prices. Kennedy responded, “President Trump has a different way of...
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