Dr. Mehmet Oz jumped in to defend President Donald Trump’s wild declare about slashing drug costs by greater than a thousand % — and immediately regretted it.
Pressed for an actual clarification, he stumbled right into a maze of unhealthy math and stranger logic that even left the host shocked.
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 %, relying on the day and the viewers.
“The president has talked about reducing drug costs, pharmaceutical costs, and he’s repeatedly claimed that he may minimize these costs by greater than 100%,” Welker mentioned, earlier than enjoying a collection of clips of Trump bragging about lowering drug costs “by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 %.”
However Dr. Oz’s explanations have been simply as gorgeous on so many ranges and led to much more confusion.
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Welker, making an attempt to make sense of the inconceivable math, supplied a easy problem, “Reducing drug costs by 400 %, something over one hundred pc, wouldn’t that successfully make them free? Is {that a} reasonable aim from the president?”
The query ought to have been a straightforward one.
A one hundred pc minimize in value would make any product free and something past that may imply sellers are paying individuals 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 cut 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 an evidence that ran proper off the rails.
If a value drops from $100 to $50, it’s a discount of $50 or 50 %, 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 realize some readability on Trump’s boast that drug costs have fallen by “1,500 %.” However Oz tried to drag the wool over her eyes with one other head-scratcher of a solution.
“Effectively, in the event you take a drug that’s $200 or $240 like we did final week and cut 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 % lower, which is spectacular, however nowhere close to the 1,000 % fantasy Oz was defending.
Social media had quite a bit 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 complete piece does is level out that Dr. Oz, amazingly for a person who’s, sure, really a coronary heart surgeon, has the identical degree of math abilities as each Donald Trump and a turnip. Or not. It’s additionally potential that having bought his soul to the satan Mehmet has to debase himself publicly this manner as a part of the discount,” one other noticed.
“Oz is a moron. Nonetheless he acquired the title physician he needed to pay for it he by no means earned it,” Threads consumer Bob Jerin proclaimed.
One other added on Instagram, “The phrase salad is hilarious 😅 wtf is he saying, trigger it sounds dumb as hell🤷🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️ I do know ya’ll are NOT falling for it, smh”
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 will’t even calculate it. It’s too excessive to calculate.”
Apparently, arithmetic that 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 chopping costs by 1,400 and 1,500 % was not too long ago tagged with a Neighborhood Word on X clarifying, “When you cut back value by one hundred pc, value turns into zero,” however that word seems to have been eliminated.
However the correction even included a hyperlink to a fundamental on-line information explaining the right way to calculate reductions, the sort of useful resource one may count on 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 not add up, the answer, it appears, is just to redefine arithmetic itself.
