Fact check: Trump’s mathematically impossible promise to cut drug prices by ‘1,000%’
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump keeps making a mathematically impossible promise.
At event after event this month and last, Trump has declared that the “most favored nation” policy he unveiled in an executive order in May is going to reduce the price of prescription drugs by 1,000% or more.
Trump said in late August: “We have something coming up, favored nations, where I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,400 to 1,500%.” He said Saturday: “We’re gonna be reducing drug prices down to a level that nobody – not by 20%, 30% – by like 1,000%. Because, you know, we’re paying sometimes 10 times more than other nations, and we’re not doing it anymore.” He said Monday: “We have something else called ‘favored nations,’ where I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,000% – by 900, 600, 500, 1,200.”
Trump’s numbers make no sense. Because of how math works.
Even if Trump’s policy does produce a big decline in drug prices – and that is very much uncertain given that it relies on cooperation by reluctant pharmaceutical companies or hypothetical future regulatory action – he can’t actually cut the price of any product by 500% to 1,500%. If he magically got the companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut.
Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would mean that Americans would get paid to acquire their medications rather than paying for them. Health economist Timothy McBride called Trump’s claims “just not logical,” noting that a 500% price reduction would mean that a drug that now costs $100 would cost…negative $400.
“I know of no drug company in the world that would give a person $400 to buy a drug that they are now pricing at $100,” McBride, a professor in the School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an email. “There are times we subsidize prices, but even then it is exceptionally rare for the size of the subsidy to exceed the price of the item, making the net price negative.”
The “most favored nation” proposal seeks to pressure pharmaceutical companies to sell their products in the US for the lowest price they sell them for in any other wealthy country. In confusing comments to Fox News last week, Trump appeared to attempt to explain how he is trying to get companies to both lower prices in the US and raise prices in other countries to offset the financial hit from the US reduction.
“For years,” he said, “we’ve been paying sometimes for a pill $100 and they’re paying $10. And I say, what’s this all about? And now the drug companies agree that I’m right. And the countries, if they don’t agree, I’ll use tariffs to get them to agree. You understand. And we’re gonna be reducing drug costs over the next year, year and a half, by not 50 or 60% – by 1,000%. Because if you think, a $10 pill – so it will be raised up from $10 to $20, because it’s the world versus us, so the world is a bigger place – so it’ll go from $10 to $20; it won’t go for $10 to $50 or $60, for them. Which is bearable. And it’ll go from $10 to $20 for us.”
The price of a pill going from $10 to $20 in the US would be a 100% increase for Americans, not a 1,000% decrease. If, as seems likely, Trump misspoke and meant that the price of a pill would go from $100 to $20 in the US, that would be an 80% decrease for Americans, again far from 1,000%.
The White House response
After those comments on Fox, CNN asked the White House to explain Trump’s claims that drug prices are going to come down somewhere between 1,000% to 1,500%.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai responded in the manner Trump’s team often does when asked about something the president has said that is obviously inaccurate: by ignoring the specific inaccuracy and declaring that Trump is right about a related but different point.
Desai said: “President Trump has correctly identified how Americans pay several times more for the same exact drugs as their peers in other wealthy nations. The Administration is committed to ensuring that drug companies make wealthy countries pay fairer rates for drugs and stop relying on Americans to subsidize the vast majority of global pharma research and development.”
We pressed the White House to specifically address Trump’s promised “1,000%” decrease. His team responded only on condition of anonymity. This time, they said they had an example: in 2023, a certain drug was listed for $521 in the US versus just $45 in Australia, so the US price was roughly 1,000% higher.
But reducing the US price of this drug from $521 to $45 would be a 91% decrease, not a 1,000% cut. If the president wanted to say that some drugs cost 1,000% more in the US than in other countries, he could simply say that; instead, he has stuck with the phony claim of a looming 1,000% cut.
The-CNN-Wire
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