No matter what President Joe Biden said in his annual address on Tuesday night, there ain’t no such thing as free drugs.

Biden spent some 25 lines of his speech boasting about changes in prescription drug policies passed during his administration, promising wonderful results from those changes and asking for more. He claimed, with a bit of economic hocus pocus, that the various new policies on Medicare prescription drugs will save money for both recipients and for taxpayers. But the arithmetic doesn’t work. Usually, if prices are artificially forced down by government, then those costs are made up by government subsidies, which come from taxpayers. The gain of one comes at the expense of the other.

Unless, of course, the “savings” are taken out of the money the drug companies would otherwise use for research and development for new drugs or from the number of choices insurance companies offer. It’s not as if drug companies and insurance companies grow free money on trees. The cost of reducing prices for both consumers and for government is a reduction in cures for sick people.

In the end, the “caps” on costs and government “negotiations” of Medicare drug prices never work as well as market forces anyway. If the Democrats had been successful in putting the price “controls” they wanted on basic-plan Medicare drug premiums when the prescription drug program was created, the formula they pushed back then (20 years ago) would have created average premiums that are considerably higher than the actual prices today. Literally. Their original proposal set a baseline price that turned out to be nearly 33% higher than the market actually created — and then provided inflation hikes for each year. It turns out that government planners have no idea how pricing mechanisms work. The average premium costs have not caught up with the Democrats’ original projections to this day.

Meanwhile, Biden said that “if drug prices rise faster than inflation, drug companies will have to pay Medicare back the difference.” Which prices? Is that for each individual drug? If the supply of an ingredient for a particular medicine falls but the price isn’t allowed to rise, there’s no way the company can afford to produce it. The result will be massive shortages.

Likewise with new-generation medicines. Typically, new medicines, and updates of old medicines, cost more because research-and-development costs are built in on the front end. Yet when production becomes regularized, prices eventually drop. After a while, much less expensive generic drugs enter the market, too. But if the prices can’t rise in any single year faster than overall inflation in the whole economy, the pricing mechanisms can’t work at all, so the long-run production gains and long-run cost savings cannot be realized.

Biden promises a presto-change-o way of making everything cost less, as if by waving the government’s magic wand. The real world doesn’t work that way.

Because of Biden’s policies, drug prices are likely to be higher in the long run, and medical choices and cures will be fewer — or perhaps all of those negative results at the same time.

On drug prices, as on so many other matters, Biden is a flim-flam man. We’ll all pay a heavy price if we get addicted to his snake oil.