“There’s two ways of calculating a percentage,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing. Warren had rightly dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim that he had lowered drug prices by up to 600%, and she demanded some “real math.” But Kennedy, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math. “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10,” Kennedy said, “that’s a 600% reduction.”
No, it’s not. This point can’t be stressed enough in case there’s a middle schooler reading the opinion page: No! It’s just not.
Kennedy didn’t come up with the 600% nonsense himself. Trump has consistently claimed that he’s reduced the price of drugs by many times more than the price of those drugs. Kennedy’s maddening repetition of pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign of a broader problem in the Trump administration.
This is a preview of Jarvis DeBerry’s latest column. Read the full column here.
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