Dr. Oz Gets Math Completely Wrong After Being Grilled By NBC About Drug Prices
administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz NBC news anchor stunned Kristen Welker After getting the math completely wrong when he was grilled about the President on Wednesday. Donald Trump’s drug price reform
“The president has talked about lowering drug prices and drug prices and has repeatedly claimed that he could reduce those prices by more than 100%,” Welker said. Meet the Press NOWbefore playing a series of clips of Trump boasting about lowering drug prices by “1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent.”
Then the NBC News anchor asked: “Wouldn’t reducing drug prices by 400%, even over 100%, effectively free them? Is that a realistic goal for the president?”
Welker’s math wasn’t quite right. Reducing drug prices by 100% would make them free, “nothing more than 100%”; This will mean that the seller will pay people to “buy” their product.
Öz said, “The President makes the calculation by saying: ‘Okay, if a drug is $100 and you reduce it to $50, it is 100 percent cheaper because you reduce it by $50 and there is only $50 left, so the amount you reduce from the price is equal to the remaining amount. They are equal, that is, 100 percent.”
“He said 1500%!” Welker remarked. “One of them said 1,500%.”
Dr. Oz then oddly explained:
If you take a drug that’s $200 or $240 like we did last week and drop it to $10, those are the numbers you’re talking about. However, the biggest question we need to ask ourselves is why haven’t we done this before? Kristen, you and I have known each other for a long time. It is no secret that we pay three times more for the same pill, produced in the same factory, even in America, and then it is no secret that the same product is sold abroad, and when the President learned about this a while ago, he was upset and started to escalate the issue in the first term, and this time he said: “I will not be stopped. I will make everyone understand that it is not America’s responsibility to produce innovative solutions to America’s health crises. The whole world benefits from these crises.” And as you know, we have achieved great success by discontinuing the drugs sold by Pfizer, the leading company in the USA, and AstraZeneca, the leading company in Europe. Last week we literally dropped the price of fertility drugs from $242 to $10.
After President Trump boasted of lowering drug prices by as much as 1,500%, it was confirmed by multiple news outlets; This was a mathematical impossibility.
“It can’t actually cut the price of any product by 500% to 1,500%. If it could get companies to magically drop the prices of all their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut.” explained CNN. “Lowering drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get money to buy their drugs rather than pay for them.”
Watch above via NBC News.
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