Something just wasn’t adding up when Dr. Mehmet Oz — the current administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid service — tried to explain president Trump’s new drug pricing scheme.
That something was his brain trying to make sense of pretty simple math.
During an interview on the NBC News “Meet the Press” segment on Wednesday, Oz was asked about Trump’s absurd claim that he slashed prescription drug prices by up to “1,500 percent” — and completely lost it.
“Cutting drug prices by 400 percent — anything over 100 percent— wouldn’t that effectively make them free?” asked anchor Kristen Welker. “Is that a realistic goal from the president?”
Oz’s response seemed to demonstrate to the world that he was the kid who never braved going up to the chalkboard to solve a math problem in front of class.
“The president does the calculation by saying, ‘OK, if a drug was $100 and you reduce it to $50, it’s 100 percent cheaper because you’re taking $50 off and leaving you with only $50,” explained the 65-year-old board-certified physician. “So the amount you took off the price is equal to the amount that’s left. They’re equal so it’s 100 percent.”
Welker, baffled, reminded Oz that Trump said 1,500 percent, perhaps letting him off easy by not calling out his horrendously mangled math; slashing a drug that costs $100 by 1,500 percent would mean it now costs $-1,400, which would seemingly mean that patients were being paid to take pharmaceuticals instead of the other way around.
But try explaining that that to Oz.
“Well, if you take a drug that is $200 or $240 like we did last week and reduce it to $10,” Oz continued, “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?”
This time, Welker didn’t even bother to correct him — he was already too busy bloviating about how awesome the administration he’s serving in is.
Dr. Oz is a certified doctor, to be clear. But he’s one with a long history of spreading blatant misinformation, like bogus health claims, or advocating unproven forms of “alternative” medicine.
His latest arithmetic catastrophe is a prime example of the absolute cranks that Trump has appointed to run his administration’s health policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump’s brain-worm-having secretary of the Health and Human Services, thinks vaccines cause autism, wants to remove fluoride from drinking water because he thinks it’s “industrial waste,” and suggested that mass shootings are caused by video games.
More on the Trump administration: Elon Musk Accuses Head of NASA of Being “Gay”