Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump’s administrator for the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies, tried to clarify and defend Trump’s wonky numbers, however spectacularly failed in an entire math meltdown.
In an interview with NBC “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Wednesday, Oz tried to cowl for his boss in Trump’s newest boasts about “slashing drug costs” by astronomical percentages, claims which have fluctuated between 1,200 and 1,500 p.c, relying on the day and the viewers.
“The president has talked about decreasing drug costs, pharmaceutical costs, and he’s repeatedly claimed that he may lower these costs by greater than 100%,” Welker mentioned, earlier than enjoying a sequence of clips of Trump bragging about lowering drug costs “by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 p.c.”
However Dr. Oz’s explanations have been simply as beautiful on so many ranges and led to much more confusion.
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Welker, making an attempt to make sense of the unattainable math, provided a easy problem, “Reducing drug costs by 400 p.c, something over one hundred pc, wouldn’t that successfully make them free? Is {that a} sensible purpose from the president?”
The query ought to have been a straightforward one.
A one hundred pc lower in value would make any product free and something past that might imply sellers are paying folks to take their merchandise. However Oz, undeterred by logic, charged forward into what can solely be described as numerical nonsense.
“The president does the calculation by saying, ‘OK, if a drug was $100 and also you scale back it to $50, it’s one hundred pc cheaper since you’re taking $50 off and left with solely $50, so the quantity you took off the value is the same as the quantity that’s left,’” Oz mentioned in a proof that ran proper off the rails.
If a value drops from $100 to $50, it’s a discount of $50 or 50 p.c, not 100. Even center schoolers know that a lot. Welker, to her credit score, didn’t interrupt, although the bewilderment on her face spoke volumes.
She pressed on anyway making an attempt to achieve some readability on Trump’s boast that drug costs have fallen by “1,500 p.c.” However Oz tried to drag the wool over her eyes with one other head-scratcher of a solution.
“Properly, when you take a drug that’s $200 or $240 like we did final week and scale back it to $10, these are the numbers you’re speaking about,” creating much more confusion as Welker started to smirk.
In actuality, that’s roughly a 95 p.c lower, which is spectacular, however nowhere close to the 1,000 p.c fantasy Oz was defending.
Social media had lots to say about Oz’s nonsensical numbers.
“Is Dr Oz silly or a cowardly sycophant? Both he doesn’t know the way math works or he does and he’s afraid of calling Trump out for his stupidity,” requested one reader on MSN.
“All this whole piece does is level out that Dr. Oz, amazingly for a person who’s, sure, truly a coronary heart surgeon, has the identical stage of math expertise as each Donald Trump and a turnip. Or not. It’s additionally attainable that having bought his soul to the satan Mehmet has to debase himself publicly this fashion as a part of the discount,” one other noticed.
“Oz is a moron. Nonetheless he obtained the title physician he needed to pay for it he by no means earned it,” Threads consumer Bob Jerin proclaimed.
The previous TV physician struggled with the identical calculation earlier this month throughout a White Home press convention, admitting, “You’ll discover, President Trump, these are discounted from $242 to $10. I don’t know what the mathematics is on that. We are able to’t even calculate it. It’s too excessive to calculate.”
Apparently, arithmetic which may or may not stump a center college pupil is now completely complicated to one of many federal authorities’s high well being care officers.
Trump’s exaggerated boasts about slashing drug prices have lengthy been derided as “MAGA math,” a inventive accounting methodology with no foundation in actuality however that does match Trump’s narrative.
A clip of the previous president bragging about slicing costs by 1,400 and 1,500 p.c was lately tagged with a Group Notice on X clarifying, “When you scale back value by one hundred pc, value turns into zero,” however that be aware seems to have been eliminated.
However the correction even included a hyperlink to a fundamental on-line information explaining the way to calculate reductions, the sort of useful resource one may anticipate a TV host-turned-federal administrator to know earlier than making an attempt to defend Trump on nationwide tv.
Ultimately, Oz’s flailing protection of Trump’s numerical fantasies was greater than only a math error, it was a snapshot of the administration’s twisted relationship with information. When numbers now not add up, the answer, it appears, is just to redefine arithmetic itself.
