2+2=5

Trump says he’s cut drug prices by up to 1,500%. That’s not possible

TRUMP: “You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%. I don’t mean 50%, I mean 14 — 1,500%.”

In 1984 Winston Smith says,

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

This is false. Cutting drug prices by more than 100% would theoretically mean that people are being paid to take medications. The Trump administration has taken steps to lower prescription drug prices, but experts say there’s no indication costs have seen such a massive drop.

Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center, called Trump’s claim “total fiction” made up by the Republican president. He agreed that it would amount to drug companies paying customers, rather than the other way around.

Yet we can expect those purveyors of misinformation and disinformation here will support Trump’s “alternative facts” on this and every other distortion up to and including that ‘two plus two made five”.