RFK Jr. Defends Trump's Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims

[mahatmakanejeeves]

RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims

President Trump has claimed that he has secured discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent on prescription drugs. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent because that would lower the price to zero.


Prescription medications appear in boxes and bottles along pharmacy shelves.
Eric Thayer/Getty Images

By Chris Cameron
Chris Cameron has repeatedly fact-checked President Trump’s bad math when it comes to prescription drug pricing. He reported from Washington.
April 22, 2026

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when talking about discounts on prescription drug prices, arguing on Wednesday that the president “has a different way of calculating.” ... “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Mr. Kennedy said during a congressional hearing. ... Mr. Kennedy is mathematically incorrect. A price reduction from $600 to $10 would be a discount of more than 98 percent. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent, because that would lower the price to zero — or suggest that the company was giving you money for buying the product.

The remark came while Mr. Kennedy was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, had asked Mr. Kennedy about the price of Protonix, a prescription drug available on the federally run TrumpRx website, compared with the price of the generic version of the drug at Costco. Ms. Warren pointed out one of many cases in which Americans using the TrumpRx service were still paying much more for drugs.

Ms. Warren took a jab at Mr. Trump’s frequent hyperbolic and mathematically impossible claims that the TrumpRx website offered prescription drugs at discounts of 400 to 1,500 percent. “Which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs,” she said. Mr. Kennedy initially did not address the question on the drug pricing and instead defended Mr. Trump’s bad math.

Mr. Trump has been making mathematically impossible claims about drug pricing for as long as he has been promoting the TrumpRx service, which began with deals announced last year with pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices. He soon lashed out at the media for not repeating the claims or for pointing out that the claims were impossible. “I got the biggest price reduction in history on drugs, pharmaceutical, and I can’t get these guys to talk about it,” he said in January.

{snip}

Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.

[RockRaven]

1. That is literally middle school mathematics that The Dotard and Brainworm are failing.

[Orrex]

2. And you know his fuckhead KKKultists will treat this bullshit explanation as gospel truth.

[LymphocyteLover]

3. Basic math isn't math in MAGA world... freaking imbeciles

[Walleye]

4. Trump: "we are ignorant about science and math. Why don't you take our drugs?"

Pharmaceuticals involve, science and math. Why on earth would I take a drug from someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about it?

[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. trump and RFK Jr. are both idiots

[LetMyPeopleVote]

6. MaddowBlog-Trump and RFK Jr. pick a losing fight over arithmetic, defend a 'different' kind of math

To hear the president tell it, people with calculators can have their way of crunching numbers, but this White House prefers a different approach.

In the Trump era, the right has largely moved on from concerns about moral relativism, which has apparently given way to *mathematical* relativism:

It’s a worldview, embraced by the White House, that rejects the idea of arithmetical truths.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-04-24T13:39:49.827Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-rfk-jr-losing-fight-math-hearing

Trump continued to wage a losing fight over arithmetic in the months that followed, and this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his best to defend the president, arguing during a congressional hearing that Trump “has a different way of calculating percentages.” The secretary, who did not appear to be kidding, added, “If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”....

Two days after the hearing, the fight continued at an event in the Oval Office. The Associated Press reported:

President Donald Trump, who helped push the term ‘fake news’ into the mainstream, now seems to have a new favorite subject: fake math.

During a Thursday event announcing a deal with drugmaker Regeneron to lower the cost of its pharmaceutical products, Trump defended his past claims that prices on prescription medications had been cut by well over 100% — something that is mathematically impossible without manufacturers dropping prices to zero and then presumably paying consumers to use their product.

....The president nevertheless ran with this, acknowledging that he’d taken “a lot of heat” for his frequent false claims about math, but nevertheless insisting that there are “two ways of calculating” percentages.

Trump: "I took a lot of heat -- I'd say, 500, 600%. But we also say sometimes 50%, 60%. Different kinds of calculation. There are two ways of calculating it."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-23T19:30:13.268Z

....This is the same president who’s so confident in his mathematical expertise that he came up with international trade tariff rates based on formulas that only exist in his head. That was obviously unwise, but it was especially problematic given his unfamiliarity with how numbers work.

I’m often reminded of something Bill Lueders wrote for The Bulwark last year: “Whatever the claim, the president has the numbers to prove it, even if he has to make them up.”

It remains an important detail. The incumbent president doesn’t use numbers and statistics like an adult; he uses numbers and statistics that he thinks sound good and make him feel better.

[Skittles]

7. they literally think everyone is as stupid as MAGAts

[LetMyPeopleVote]

8. trump is too stupid to understand even simple mathematical concepts

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are spectacularly flunking math

Kennedy’s maddening repetition of Trump’s pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign that the president is surrounded with nothing but yes-men.

Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are spectacularly flunking math
Kennedy’s maddening repetition of Trump’s pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign that the president is surrounded with nothing but yes-men. www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

— Newswire - World 🌎 Independent News Network Pro-Democracy (@democracyblue.bsky.social) 2026-04-25T13:49:15.048Z

https://www.ms.now/opinion/trump-rfk-jr-prescription-drug-prices-math-wrong

“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 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.....

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.....

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?”