Dr. Oz Gets Math Completely Wrong After Being Grilled By NBC About Drug Prices
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz confounded NBC News anchor Kristen Welker on Wednesday after he got the math completely wrong upon being grilled about President Donald Trump’s pharmaceutical price reform.
“The president has talked about lowering drug prices, pharmaceutical prices, and he’s repeatedly claimed that he could cut those prices by more than 100%,” said Welker during an interview on Meet the Press NOW, before playing a series of clips of Trump boasting about cutting drug prices “by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%.”
The NBC News anchor then questioned, “Cutting drug prices by 400%, anything over 100%, wouldn’t that effectively make them free? Is that a realistic goal from the president?”
Welker’s math wasn’t quite right. Cutting drug prices by 100% would make them free, not “anything over 100%, which would imply the seller would pay people to “buy” their products.
Dr. Oz replied, “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%.'”
“He said 1,500%!” Welker pointed out. “In one of those, he said 1,500%.”
Dr. Oz then bizarrely explained:
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. That stated, the bigger question we should be asking ourselves is why didn’t we do this earlier? Kristen, you and I have known each other for a long time. This has not been a secret that we pay three times more for the exact same pill, made in the same factory, even if it’s made in America, then that same product sales for overseas, and when the president learned about this a while back, he got upset and he started making a big deal about it both in the first term and this time around he said, “I’m not gonna be stopped. I’m gonna make sure everyone understands that it is not America’s responsibility to carry the entire burden for innovating solutions to America’s health crises. The entire world benefits from those crises.” And so as you know we have achieved great success by dropping drugs that are sold by the leading U.S. company Pfizer, leading European company AstraZeneca. Last week we reduced prices for fertility drugs by literally $242 to $10.
President Trump was fact-checked by several news outlets after he boasted about cutting drug prices by as much as 1,500% – a mathematical impossibility.
“He can’t actually cut the price of any product by 500% to 1,500%. If he magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut,” explained CNN. “Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications rather than paying for them.”
Watch above via NBC News.
