President Biden’s State of the Nation Address in 2023

A claim: “Outside Columbus, Ohio, Intel is building semiconductor factories on thousands of acres — literally a field of dreams. It will create 10,000 jobs — that’s one investment: 7,000 construction jobs, 3,000 jobs when the factories are finished — that’s what they call Jobs that pay an average of $130,000 a year, and many don’t require a college degree.”

Fact check: This is most likely true

Details: Intel announced in a statement in January that the company is investing more than $20 billion to build new chip factories in Ohio. The chipmaker said the factories would create “3,000 Intel jobs and 7,000 construction jobs during assembly.” Dispatch of Columbus is quoted Intel says in its news release that the average factory salary will be $135,000.

The Dispatch said Intel did not provide a breakdown of the jobs, but cited a Bureau of Labor Statistics model that projected 1,441 jobs and the types of workers who could fill those jobs at the plant. “[M]More than half, including technicians, assemblers, supervisors and machinists, require only a high school education,” the Dispatch reported on the model’s assessment.

Claim: “We’re finally giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices. Bringing down prescription drug costs doesn’t just save seniors money: it cuts the federal deficit, by billions of dollars, by hundreds of billions of dollars because these prescription drugs are drugs purchased by Medicare to keep their commitment to the seniors.”

Fact Check: True

Details: President Biden is referring to the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which he signed in August 2022. It includes provisions that requires the federal government to negotiate prices for higher-cost prescription drugs under Medicare, institutes a yearly cap for out-of-pocket prescription drug costs in Medicare and continues to lower health insurance premiums on state-based marketplaces. It also requires drug companies that raise prices in excess of the inflation rate to pay rebates to Medicare. 

Notably, it limits cost-sharing for insulin, so that Medicare recipients pay no more than $35 per month. This impacts not just seniors, but roughly 3.3 million Medicare Part D enrollees who need insulin. 

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law overall, which includes these prescription drug provisions, would reduce the deficit by $237 billion from 2022 through 2031. 

Claim: “Nearly 25% of the entire national debt, that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by [the Trump] one administration, the last.”

Fact check: True, with the caveat that the coronavirus pandemic struck during the presidency of Donald Trump

Details: The current national debt is approx 31.4 trillion dollars dollars. According to the numbers it tracks Treasury Departmentthe national debt has increased by about $7.8 trillion in the four years that Trump has been president, which is 24.8% of the total national debt.

However, it is important to note that almost 4 trillion dollars some of that debt was added to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, spending that was passed with bipartisan support.

Claim: “Big oil just reported its record profits. Last year they made $200 billion in the midst of a global energy crisis.”

Fact check: Seems to be true, although companies were not identified.

Details: Global oil companies have rebounded since the pandemic to post their highest ever profits since people started using petroleum. Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and Shell all reported record profits in 2022 — a year in which Russia’s war on Ukraine collided with the post-pandemic economic recovery to drive oil prices to their highest levels in history. 

President Biden did not identify the oil companies by name, but according to press releases and financial reports released by major oil companies, their net profits, listed below, show profits totaling over $200 billion. 

By Willie James Inman and Irina Ivanova

Claim: “We’ve already created — [with] your help—800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, fastest growth in 40 years.”

Fact check: True

Details: Data from Art US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed that the manufacturing sector had about 12,196,000 workers in production when President Biden took office in January 2021.

Preliminary BLS data said there were about 12,999,000 manufacturing workers in January 2023, an increase of about 800,000.

A claim: “One in 10 Americans has diabetes. Many of you in this room and in the audience have diabetes. But every day, millions of people need insulin to control their diabetes so they can literally stay alive. Insulin has been around for over 100 years. The guy who invented it didn’t even patent it because he wanted it to be available to everyone. It costs pharmaceutical companies about $10 a vial to make this insulin.”

Fact check: True

Details: In accordance with Center for Disease Control and Preventionn National Diabetes Statistics Report“37.3 million Americans — about 1 in 10 — have diabetes.”

More precisely, as of June 2022, 11.3% of the US adult population has diabetes. About 28.7 million people nationwide are diagnosed with diabetes, while 8.5 million are undiagnosed.

Insulin, a hormone used to treat diabetes in some patients, was first discovered more than 100 years ago in 1922 and “marked a major breakthrough in the medicine and therapy of patients with diabetes,” according to National Institutes of Health.

And while there is no definitive data on the exact cost of producing a vial of life-saving treatment, midnightl news articles link to a 2018 peer-reviewed article BMJ Global Health this puts the cost at around $10 per vial, although some experts say it could be slightly higher. It is clear that insulin is much cheaper than some pharmaceutical companies have been in the past.