“There’s two ways of calculating a percentage,” Health and Human 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, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math.
If the price of a drug were reduced from $600 to $10, that would be a 98.3% decrease. A 600% reduction, Warren said, “means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.” While such a reduction would be a significant and beneficial policy change, Warren repeated a point that Democrats have been making for months: Several of the name-brand drugs at the TrumpRx website, even at lower prices, still cost considerably more than their generic equivalents.
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: that the president has completely surrounded himself with yes-men during this term. Apparently, nobody has dared to tell him he’s wrong. Instead, they’re standing around marveling at the emperor’s new math.
When an administration is known equally for its lies and its incompetence, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to know which is at play at any time. Trump tells — and demands that his officials tell — obvious lies: about his poll numbers, about inflation, about Black migrants eating cats and dogs, about noncitizens voting. Just Thursday, he lied that more people attended his inauguration than the 1963 March on Washington.
But Trump also appears not to know things he should know — such as which Americans could have prevented the Civil War, why the president of Liberia can speak English “so beautifully” and why you don’t stare at a solar eclipse. Thus, it’s unclear if his insistence that he’s reduced drug prices by up to 600% is an authoritarian demand that people accept what he knows (and they know) to be a lie — or if the president and his appointees, who almost to a person are out of their depth, really are that mathematically inept.
The Trump White House isn’t the first group of policymakers pushing bogus math. In 1897, the Indiana House passed — unanimously! — “an act introducing a new mathematical truth,” namely that pi, a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, equals 3.2. The roughest approximation of pi, an irrational number, is of course 3.14. A mocking editorial from The Chicago Tribune said, “An Illinois circle or a circle originating in Ohio will find its proportions modified as soon as it lands on Indiana soil,” and wondered if Indiana wouldn’t eventually take another look at pi, “lop off another decimal and call it 3.” (The bill died in the state Senate.)
We’re not dealing with geometry, just basic arithmetic. And this administration is flunking.
What the Trump administration is saying feels worse. Because in discussing the price of prescription drugs, we’re not dealing with geometry, just basic arithmetic. And this administration is flunking.
Surely, Kennedy had access to a pencil and paper between his face-off with Warren on Wednesday and his Oval Office meeting with Trump on Thursday. But he didn’t check his work, because while he was in the president’s presence, he claimed that Warren was the one wrong. “She was ridiculing President Trump for his math,” Kennedy said as he stood behind Trump. “She was saying it’s mathematically impossible to have a drug drop by 600% cost. And I said, ‘Well, if the drug was $100 and it raises to $600, that would be a 600% rise. But if it drops from $600 to $100, that’s a 600% savings.’”
“Right,” Trump nodded.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who serves under Kennedy as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and who graduated from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and its Wharton Business School — stood there nodding and smiling. But the nation’s math teachers must have been banging their heads on their whiteboards.
Kennedy was wrong every way it was possible to be wrong. First, $100 to $600 is a 500% increase. A drop from $600 to $100 would be an 83% decrease. Notice that Kennedy used $10 as his final price Wednesday and $100 as his final price Thursday. But somehow, $600 to $10 and $600 to $100 are both 600% reductions.
There were a couple of paper cups on the table in front of Kennedy as he testified to the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, and it would have been perfect if Warren had asked Kennedy to fill one of them to the top and then pour out 600%. The reason he wouldn’t have been able to pour out 600% is the same reason you can’t drop a price by that much.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the keeper of health care data and statistics for the country. We shouldn’t expect the HHS secretary to be able to do all the high-level math the department’s statisticians do, but we should expect him to solve a problem that might have appeared on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.