Trump’s prescription drug math makes no sense. RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz have defended it anyway

(CNN) — 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.

Kennedy: “President Trump has a different way of calculating”

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 calculating. If – there’s two ways of calculating percentage. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”

That is just not true. It’s a 98.3% reduction, period. There is no mathematically valid way of calculating percentages that would make it a 600% reduction.

Kennedy’s remark drew considerable mockery on social media. But he made a similar comment at a White House event with Trump on Thursday – and deployed additional incorrect numbers while trying to support his case.

Kennedy, apparently alluding to his exchange with Warren, said he had on Wednesday told a Democratic senator who challenged Trump’s claims of a 600% reduction in drug prices: “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.”

“That’s right,” Trump interjected as Kennedy was explaining. But it’s not.

An increase from $100 to $600 is actually a 500% increase, not a 600% increase. And a drop from $600 to $100 is an 83.3% reduction, not a 600% reduction. Kennedy claimed that Trump was using a “mathematical device,” but there’s no valid mathematical method that produces his numbers.

Trump added moments later that while he has taken “a lot of heat” for claiming 500%, 600% and 700% reductions, “We also say sometimes 50%, 60%; different kind of calculation – 70, 80 and 90%.” He conceded, “And people understand that better.” But he added, wrongly: “But there are two ways of calculating it.” He then said, “It doesn’t make any difference,” since even declines of 60% and more would be unprecedented, but then continued, “But it’s also 500, 600, 700 depending on the way you want to look at it. So, the way you word the calculation – it’s either one.”

It’s not.

Oz: “It’s too high to calculate without a more studied approach”

Another top Trump health official, Dr. Mehmet Oz, tried a different tactic at an event with the president in October: dodging Trump’s dodgy percentages by declaring, incorrectly, that the decline between $242 and $10 is so big that the percentage decline can’t even be stated.

Trump had said at the event: “Drug prices are coming down 400%, 200%, 600%, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before.” He then added, “Five hundred, 600, 800%, in some cases even more than that. It’s hard to believe.”

Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spoke after Trump. Oz made a claim about the price of one common fertility drug being reduced from $242 to $10, then said, “I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s a lot. It’s too high to calculate without a more studied approach.”

But… you just need a few seconds with a calculator, not extensive study. It’s a 95.9% reduction.

Oz: “Those are the numbers you’re talking about”

Oz was pressed about Trump’s wildly inaccurate percentages in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker days later. He offered his own inaccurate calculation in response.

“The president does the calculation by saying, ‘Okay, if a drug was $100 and you reduce it to $50, it’s 100% cheaper, because you’re taking $50 off and left with only $50. So the amount you took off the price is equal to the amount that’s left. They’re equal, so it’s 100%.’”

No. Whatever Trump and Oz may think, reducing the price of a drug from $100 to $50 is a 50% cut, not a 100% cut.

When Welker pressed Oz by noting that Trump had claimed a “1,500%” cut in one of the video clips she had played for Oz, not a mere 100% cut, Oz said, “Well, if you take a drug that is $200 – or $240 like we did last week – and reduce it to $10, those are the numbers you’re talking about.”

Nope. You’re only talking about a 1,500% cut if you’re using phony math.

White House spokesperson: Trump is right about a different point

In September, CNN asked the White House to explain Trump’s claims that drug prices were going to decline between 1,000% to 1,500%.

Spokesperson Kush Desai responded in the manner the White House communications team often does when asked about a falsehood from the president: by ignoring the specific inaccuracy and declaring that the president is right about a related but different point.

Desai said: “President Trump has correctly identified how Americans pay several times more for the same exact drugs as their peers in other wealthy nations. The Administration is committed to ensuring that drug companies make wealthy countries pay fairer rates for drugs and stop relying on Americans to subsidize the vast majority of global pharma research and development.”

When CNN pressed the White House to specifically address Trump’s promised “1,000%” decrease, his team responded only on condition of anonymity. This time, an official said they had an example: in 2023, a certain drug was listed for $521 in the US versus just $45 in Australia, so the US price was roughly 1,000% higher.

But reducing the US price of this drug from $521 to $45 would be a 91.4% decrease, not a 1,000% decrease. If the president wanted to say that some drugs cost 1,000% more in the US than in other countries, he could simply say that.

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