Let's talk about the candidates. So of course the anti-Trump press, of which is most of the press, they did their fact-checking. And I don't know, I can't tell if the fact-checking is fake anymore. I mean I don't really trust anything any of the politicians say, but I also don't trust the fact-checkers. And here's a perfect example of that. So I think this was either CNN or MSNBC, I forget, but one of the fact-checking facts was, so Trump said he was pleased to announce that last year for the first time in fifty-one years the cost of prescription drugs actually went down. All right, that's a big claim. The cost of prescription drugs went down. And the fact-checker said this is false. That's a very clean statement. It's not mostly false or a little false. It's just false. This is false. And the explanation is prescription drug costs are on the rise, exactly the opposite, particularly for name-brand drugs according to the Associated Press analysis. But do you see this clause, "particularly for name-brand drugs"? That's your little red flag there. Because I only know a little bit about this topic, but here's what I'm suspecting. I know that it was the FDA, I think, who was speeding up the approval of generics. Now if you speed up the approval of generics, there's sort of a rule of thumb that when you get to the third generic that's offered for the same drug, it's that third one that makes competition really increase. The competition, when the third one gets in, and then the price drops pretty quickly. So what the government did, Trump's administration, is they sped up that process so you can get two or three generics quickly. My assumption is, open to fact-checking here, my assumption is that that process worked because they've announced it worked. I haven't seen any pushback on that. And that the cost of generics probably did go down.

Now here's the clever part. How many total dollars are spent on generics in any year and how many total dollars are spent on name-brand drugs, which are usually the newer ones and the ones you really need because maybe that drug didn't exist until then? Well, I don't know the answer to that. If it turns out that people are spending more on the name-brand drugs but they're spending less on the generics, then you really kind of need to know what's the mix of name-brand to generics. Because if all the generics are going down but the name-brand might be going up, that would suggest that the Trump administration had a big win on at least half of those that they could control, the generic part. And then the other part, apparently there's some hope to get some kind of legislation that would maybe help with the other stuff. I don't know exactly. I don't know what kind of legislation interferes with the free market in that way, but they've got some kind of idea anyway. So my point is I don't know if that's exactly false or if it's a little bit true, a little bit false, or even if the generic, the amount that people spend for generics, if it's more than they spend for the name-brand drugs or it could be more than, you know, in other words if more people could be moved to the generic it might be true. So I'm not sure I trust the fact-checkers on this.