“It’s the prices, stupid,” Uwe E. Reinhardt and authors famously wrote in their 2003 article describing the cause of high health care spending in the United States.1 Since then, multiple large analyses have confirmed that the prices of labor and goods, including pharmaceuticals and administrative costs, more so than differences in utilization, are the primary drivers of high health care spending.2,3
The Biden administration has left NIH in a weakened state, intensifying politicization of science on Capitol Hill and eroding the bipartisan support the government’s premier biomedical research agency has traditionally enjoyed.
