The White House has finally been called on to fabricate its pharmaceutical savings—and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick didn’t take it well.
For months, Donald Trump has seemingly plucked numbers out of thin air to impress an ignorant public—or his sycophantic followers—on his supposedly big pharmaceutical deals, he boasts which “reduced drug prices by 1,200; 1,300; 1,400; 1,500 percent.”
The lie continued Wednesday night, when Trump said during his national address that he had negotiated to lower drug prices by “400, 500, and even 600 percent.”
But Fox News host John Roberts saw the numerical wonder, scoring Lutnick during an interview Thursday and insisting the math was simply “not possible.”
“Well, if you cut something by 100 percent the cost goes down to zero,” Roberts said. “If you cut it by 4-5-600 percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product.”
“So tell me, how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?” asked the host.
But Lutnick’s answer didn’t make sense either.
“No, what he’s saying is—that he gets—if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13, right? If you’re looking at it from $13, it goes down seven times,” Lutnick said.
“No, it’s not—” Roberts interjected.
“Well, but before it’s a 700 percent higher price. It’s down 700 percent now. So, $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one. You can say, it’s down 87 percent, or you can say it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same one. So it just depends on the way you look at the public before,” insists Lutnick to be you know everything he said,” he is saying.”
“We are reducing the price of drugs,” Lutnick emphasized.
But the president has not tangibly reduced drug costs. In May, Trump wrote an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no agreement, the United States would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there was no noticeable movement in either direction.
In November, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that they had negotiated new prices for 15 expensive drugs covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program, Part D. The negotiations were conducted in Medicare’s second round. Drug Price Negotiation Programwhich was promulgated by the previous administration under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Still, the cost of those drugs—which include Ozempic and Wegovy—is not expected to decrease until 2027.
Instead, evidence exists that drug prices actually rose for about 700 drugs during Trump’s second term, according to September. report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Previously, Trump claimed that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries were due to US federal subsidies, which he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that is not reality: the United States pays more for drugs because it is out of the high-income, first-world countries that mainly support universal public health coverage.
Potential solutions that researchers argue could significantly address high drug prices in the United States include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies in the country, retooling insurance benefits to curb out-of-pocket costs, and recentralizing price negotiations by leveraging a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, or any number of nations other rich from a report), Commonwealth Funda private American foundation focused on health care reform.