Janet McCaskill was on vacation in Arizona with her husband and best friend when she heard that President Donald Trump had suggested he might be able to bring the cost of popular weight-loss drugs down to $150 a month.

“The thought of it going to $150 a month is dramatic,” said McCaskill, a grandmother from North Carolina who’s lost 100 pounds with the help of GLP-1 medicines, a class best known for the diabetes drug Ozempic. “That is most fantastic – if it comes to pass.”

Trump planted the idea Thursday in an Oval Office news conference about an entirely different set of drugs – those for in vitro fertilization – before his Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, stepped in to warn it wasn’t a done deal.

Nonetheless, Trump’s comments made waves. Patients who’ve struggled to afford the pricey medicines shared hope the price could be reached. Doctors called it “huge for patients,” if true. And in a sign that Wall Street took it seriously, stocks of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the makers of GLP-1 drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound, fell significantly, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in the companies’ market values.

It’s just not clear it’ll actually happen.

An awkward moment in the Oval

It started with a familiar refrain from the president, who’s previously lamented the cost difference of weight-loss drugs in Europe compared with the US.

“In London, you’d buy a certain drug for $130 … and in New York, you pay $1,300 for the same thing,” Trump said in opening remarks of his IVF announcement Thursday.