‘Two ways of calculating': Trump defends his mathematically impossible calculations on drug prices
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. backed Trump’s percentage claims as the president said drug costs had fallen by 500% to 600%, a mathematically impossible figure.
- On Thursday, President Donald Trump defended his claims of 600% drug price reductions during an Oval Office event alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
- Kennedy defended the President's math after Senator Elizabeth Warren ridiculed the 600% figure, arguing Trump possesses a "different way of calculating" percentages.
- Reducing prices by more than 100% is mathematically impossible, as it would require companies to pay consumers to take medications instead of charging for them.
- Trump also applied his unconventional logic to other subjects, claiming his 2017 inaugural crowd size matched Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 speech and arguing his Iran war timeline projections were accurate.
- These comments extend Trump's history of "alternative facts," with observers characterizing the pattern as a new focus on "fake math" following his promotion of the "fake news" term.
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71 Articles
Donald Trump has apparently invented a completely new way of doing calculations – much to the surprise of most others.
RFK Jr. said there's more than one way to calculate a percentage decrease. That doesn't add up
"It’s mathematically impossible" for the reduction to be higher than 100% and for the consumer to still have to pay something, a mathematics and statistics associate professor said.
Fact-checking RFK Jr.'s claim there's more than one way to calculate a percentage decrease
President Donald Trump has regularly said that drug-price discounts on his watch are greater than 100%, which isn’t mathematically possible. Now his health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is trying to back up his faulty math.
‘2 ways of calculating’: Trump defends his mathematically impossible calculations on drug prices
The president’s incorrect take on percentages came just after his health chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brought up the issue on his own during the same Oval Office event Thursday.
RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz defend Trump’s prescription drug math despite it not adding up
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.
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