EXAMPLE 1 Generic Medicines

What is wrong with the following claim, and how would you state it correctly?

Most generic medications aren’t 50% or 75% less expensive than their brand named equivalents, they are 100 times cheaper!!

—David Belk, The True Cost of Healthcare A View of Healthcare Costs from the Inside, www.truecostofhealthcare.org

The claim was rephrased (by another pair of doctors) as the following:

Generic medications can cost 100 percent less than their brand-name equivalent.

—www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=554443731254232\&story_fbid=619922344706370

What’s wrong with that claim?

The first claim mixes “times” with a form of “more.” The second claim would indicate that generic medicines cost nothing. Correct versions of the statements would be: “Generic medicines cost 1% as much as their brand-name equivalents” and “Brand-name medicines cost 100 times as much as their generic equivalents.”