Trump Claims He's Cutting Drug Prices by "1,000%" — Which Would Mean Pharmacies Pay You

At event after event throughout 2025 and 2026, Trump has claimed that his "Most Favored Nation" drug pricing policy will cut prescription drug prices by "500%, 600%," and sometimes "1,000%."

This is not a rounding error. It is mathematically impossible.

• A 100% price cut would make the drug free — $0
• A 500% price cut on a $100 drug would mean the pharmacy owes you $400
• A 1,000% price cut on a $100 drug would mean the pharmacy owes you $900

You cannot reduce something by more than 100%. This is not economics — it's arithmetic. The maximum possible reduction of any price is 100%, at which point the item is free.

What Trump apparently means

The White House's attempted explanation: some drugs cost roughly 1,000% more in the U.S. than in other countries. For example, a drug listed at $521 in the U.S. might cost $45 in Australia — so the U.S. price is about 1,058% higher. But reducing the price from $521 to $45 would be a 91% decrease, not a 1,000% cut.

If Trump wanted to say "some drugs cost 10 times more in the U.S. than abroad," he could say that. Instead he claims a "1,000% cut" — which is either a lie or a fundamental misunderstanding of percentages by the president, his health secretary, and his Medicare administrator.

Trump's defense

When pressed, Trump acknowledged having claimed "500%, 600%" reductions, then added: "We also sometimes say 50%, 60%." He called it a "different kind of calculation."

It is not a different kind of calculation. 500% and 50% are not two ways of expressing the same number. They differ by a factor of ten. The Washington Post headline:

"'Two ways of calculating': Trump defends his mathematically impossible calculations on drug prices"

RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz double down

In Senate testimony in April 2026, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended Trump's math. His example: if a drug drops from $600 to $10, RFK Jr. called that a "600% decrease." It is a 98.3% decrease.

PolitiFact's headline: "RFK Jr. said there's more than one way to calculate a percentage decrease. That doesn't add up."

Dr. Mehmet Oz, running CMS, has similarly defended the numbers. CNN: "Trump's prescription drug math makes no sense. RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz have defended it anyway."

The Health Secretary and the CMS Administrator — two people responsible for the health care of hundreds of millions of Americans — are publicly defending arithmetic that a middle-school math student could correct.

Why it matters beyond the math

The drug pricing policy itself (Most Favored Nation) is a real concept with real potential to reduce prices. If the U.S. paid what other developed countries pay, some prices would drop 80–90%. That would be a genuine achievement worth celebrating.

Instead, the president and his entire health apparatus are lying about the numbers — inflating a real 80% cut into a fake 1,000% cut — because the real number isn't big enough for the performance. The policy is undermined by the lies told about it. When the actual reductions arrive and they're "only" 50–90%, Trump will have set an expectation ten times higher than reality — an expectation he invented by not understanding percentages.