Copyright Atlanta Black Star
Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, tried to explain and defend Trump’s wonky numbers, but spectacularly failed in a complete math meltdown. In an interview with NBC “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Wednesday, Oz tried to cover for his boss in Trump’s latest boasts about “slashing drug prices” by astronomical percentages, claims that have fluctuated between 1,200 and 1,500 percent, depending on the day and the audience. “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%,” Welker said, before playing a series of clips of Trump bragging about reducing drug prices “by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent.” But Dr. Oz’s explanations were just as stunning on so many levels and led to even more confusion. ‘What’s Wrong with HIM?’: Trump Trips Over His Words Mid-Speech, Loses Patience with Himself, and His Final Recovery Left Viewers Scratching Their Heads Welker, trying to make sense of the impossible math, offered a simple challenge, “Cutting drug prices by 400 percent, anything over 100 percent, wouldn’t that effectively make them free? Is that a realistic goal from the president?” The question should have been an easy one. A 100 percent cut in price would make any product free and anything beyond that would mean sellers are paying people to take their products. But Oz, undeterred by logic, charged ahead into what can only be described as numerical nonsense. “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 left with only $50, so the amount you took off the price is equal to the amount that’s left,’” Oz said in an explanation that ran right off the rails. If a price drops from $100 to $50, it’s a reduction of $50 or 50 percent, not 100. Even middle schoolers know that much. Welker, to her credit, didn’t interrupt, though the bewilderment on her face spoke volumes. She pressed on anyway attempting to gain some clarity on Trump’s boast that drug prices have fallen by “1,500 percent.” But Oz tried to pull the wool over her eyes with another head-scratcher of an answer. “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,” creating even more confusion as Welker began to smirk. In reality, that’s roughly a 95 percent decrease, which is impressive, but nowhere near the 1,000 percent fantasy Oz was defending. Social media had a lot to say about Oz’s nonsensical numbers. “Is Dr Oz stupid or a cowardly sycophant? Either he doesn’t know how math works or he does and he is afraid of calling Trump out for his stupidity,” asked one reader on MSN. “All this entire piece does is point out that Dr. Oz, amazingly for a man who is, yes, actually a heart surgeon, has the same level of math skills as both Donald Trump and a turnip. Or not. It’s also possible that having sold his soul to the devil Mehmet has to debase himself publicly this way as part of the bargain,” another observed. “Oz is a moron. However he got the title doctor he had to pay for it he never earned it,” Threads user Bob Jerin proclaimed. The former TV doctor struggled with the same calculation earlier this month during a White House press conference, admitting, “You’ll notice, President Trump, these are discounted from $242 to $10. I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s too high to calculate.” Apparently, arithmetic that might or might not stump a middle school student is now thoroughly confusing to one of the federal government’s top health care officials. Trump’s exaggerated boasts about slashing drug costs have long been derided as “MAGA math,” a creative accounting method with no basis in reality but that does fit Trump’s narrative. A clip of the former president bragging about cutting prices by 1,400 and 1,500 percent was recently tagged with a Community Note on X clarifying, “If you reduce price by 100 percent, price becomes zero,” but that note appears to have been removed. But the correction even included a link to a basic online guide explaining how to calculate discounts, the kind of resource one might expect a TV host-turned-federal administrator to understand before trying to defend Trump on national television. In the end, Oz’s flailing defense of Trump’s numerical fantasies was more than just a math error, it was a snapshot of the administration’s twisted relationship with facts. When numbers no longer add up, the solution, it seems, is simply to redefine arithmetic itself.
