WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about how good he’s, apparently has hassle with primary arithmetic, having asserted a mystifying lie about drug costs a number of occasions now.
“You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500%. I don’t mean 50%, I mean 1400, 1500%,” he informed reporters Sunday earlier than boarding Air Drive One to return to the White Home following one other weekend of golf at his New Jersey course.
He had made the identical false declare 12 days earlier at a reception for Republican members of Congress: “We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1000%, 600%, 500%, 1500%.”
The declaration, in fact, is absurd on its face.
A product turns into free if the sale value is lowered by 100%. To cut back the price of a prescription drug past that means that the shopper would really obtain a rebate to take the treatment off the pharmacy’s fingers.
Trump’s “1500%” declare would imply {that a} affected person would obtain a prescription that usually prices $100 for nothing, together with $1,400 in money.
White Home press aides didn’t reply to HuffPost’s queries about what Trump might need meant.
“He’s beyond unusual. And that I’ve never met a person so intellectually and emotionally — because there is no compensation — limited,” stated Charles Leerhsen, the co-author of Trump’s 1990 ebook “Surviving at the Top,” who has been warning about Trump’s innumeracy and, extra usually, his ignorance, since Trump started his first run for president in 2015.
“And that’s why some people mistake his idiocy for ‘chess on three levels,’” Leerhsen continued, “because, being unable to understand him, and feeling that nobody could be as dumb as he seems, they arrive at the conclusion that he is actually smarter than they are.”
AP Picture/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Over time, Trump has repeatedly boasted about how clever he’s, providing as proof the truth that his uncle taught on the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” Trump wrote in a 2018 social media put up.
Leerhsen stated Trump’s obvious incapability to grasp how percentages work helps clarify his enterprise failures, reminiscent of massively overpaying for the Plaza Resort in New York Metropolis and bankrupting casinos in Atlantic Metropolis.
“That’s exactly why those things happened. He’s not one of those people who compensates for being bad at one thing — say, words — by being good at another — say, numbers,” he stated.
In actuality, Trump has really undone his predecessor Joe Biden’s efforts to scale back prescription costs. On his first day in workplace, Trump rescinded a protracted record of Biden’s govt orders, together with these lowering drug costs for enrollees of Medicare and Medicaid.
Final week, Trump posted a letter on social media that he stated he had despatched to Eli Lilly and Firm demanding that it cost its American clients the low costs it fees elsewhere on this planet. He then posted letters to 16 different main pharmaceutical corporations.
“If you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices,” Trump wrote.
He additionally complained that trade proposals to decrease costs, as he had demanded in a Might 12 govt order, had solely “promised more of the same: shifting blame and requesting policy changes that would result in billions of dollars in handouts to industry.”
