The industry's output of new drugs has risen only modestly in the last two decades despite a more than sixfold increase, after adjusting for inflation, in research and development spending, to more than $30 billion annually.
The funding levels in the Republican draft "essentially amount to harmful cuts because they do not even keep up with the level of inflation for research," Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX), the senior Democrat on the science committee, said at the hearing.
It also gives evidence of grade inflation, citing research from education expert Professor Alan Smithers showing how the A-level pass rate has risen from 68.2% in 1982 to 97.8% in 2011.
The real causes of researchers' despair lie deeper than an inflation-lagging research budget.
Since 2001, insurance premiums have jumped 78% for family coverage, far outpacing inflation, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based health care policy research foundation.
The C.P.I. may very well be understating inflation, but his research focused on changes in the inflation rate rather than its absolute level.
When the stimulus funds are included, Garrison says, the real increase is only 2.4%--just enough to keep pace with biomedical research inflation.
The National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) budget should at least keep pace with biomedical research inflation of 3% to 4% annually, which hasn't happened in recent years.
It would be the 10th year in a row that NIH's budget has not kept pace with biomedical research inflation, he says.
