Editorials & Other Articles

“There’s two ways of calculating a percentage,” Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing. Warren had rightly dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim that he had lowered drug prices by up to 600%, and she demanded some “real math.” But Kennedy, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math. “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10,” Kennedy said, “that’s a 600% reduction.”

No, it’s not. This point can’t be stressed enough in case there’s a middle schooler reading the opinion page: No! It’s just not....

Kennedy didn’t come up with the 600% nonsense himself. Trump has consistently claimed that he’s reduced the price of drugs by many times more than the price of those drugs. Kennedy’s maddening repetition of pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign of a broader problem: that the president has completely surrounded himself with yes-men during this term. Apparently, nobody has dared to tell him he’s wrong. Instead, they’re standing around marveling at the emperor’s new math.....

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who serves under Kennedy as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and who graduated from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and its Wharton Business School — stood there nodding and smiling. But the nation’s math teachers must have been banging their heads on their whiteboards.



Kennedy was wrong every way it was possible to be wrong. First, $100 to $600 is a 500% increase. A drop from $600 to $100 would be an 83% decrease. Notice that Kennedy used $10 as his final price Wednesday and $100 as his final price Thursday. But somehow, $600 to $10 and $600 to $100 are both 600% reductions.....

As HHS secretary, Kennedy oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is the keeper of health care data and statistics for the country. We shouldn’t expect the HHS secretary to be able to do all the high-level math the department’s statisticians do, but we should expect him to solve a problem that might have appeared on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”