This article raises important issues but it also cherry picks some findings and makes some unsupported claims. I am not able to link / dig up sources for all of the below, but I should probably do so at some point bc there is a lot of incomplete and biased info out there (on all sides)

- article claims that spending on meds is biggest source of overspending compared to other developed countries. The article they link to only evaluates a few specific cost areas and does not present sufficient evidence to support the claim in the article. Under 10% of US healthcare spend is on rx drugs, that's middle-of-the-pack compared to OECD. Biggest driver of us HC spend is hospital and physician care (50% of spend). Also hospital spend has grown faster than drug spend last few years. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-expenditures.htm

- the study that analyzes cost of developing cancer drugs ignores cost of failure. The article i think mentions that one study includes cost of failure for cancer drugs but puts failure rate at 25%; I don't know what sample they are looking at or how they define failure, but historically cancer drugs have a less than 10% chance of getting approved from phase 1

- the article says that most cost is "early" and cheap i.e. in phase 2 failure. It is true that 60%+ of phase 2 fail, but phase 2 failure is not early or cheap. The article mentions the cost of running a phase 2 study but ignores all the costs required to get to phase 2. It can cost $100-200M+ Just to get to phase 2 and only 35-40% of drugs make it past that. Only mentioning the cost of a phase 2, and not all the stuff that is before phase 2, is misleading and makes me wonder whether the authors are biased. Phase 2 failure is the biggest driver of cost of drug development. Paul et al 2010 nature rev drug discovery

- it criticizes the tufts studies bc the numbers are proprietary. That's fair but just bc the dataset isn't public doesn't mean the results are wrong. The studies the article mentions to "refute" the tufts data are even more flawed than the tufts one (see above point about the cancer drug cost study that ignores cost of failure).

- mentions the tufts study includes "capitalized" costs. Even excluding those costs, the cost of developing a drug is over $1B

- mentions that companies only develop cancer drugs because they are most profitable. But doesn't mention that developing drugs for almost any other indication is not profitable. If developing drugs was really so cheap and profitable, pharma would be developing a lot more drugs than it is

- does not discuss the declining returns to pharma r&d, erooms law, and pharmas use of the balance sheet to fund r&d in recent years because pharma r&d is failing and they have to buy drugs from startups

- ignores all r&d spend by non big pharma. Most drugs are developed by small companies not pharma, but pharma buys the small companies before the drugs are commercialized. So all the industry's profits accrue to big pharma but r&d costs are spread out

To me, the fact that this article makes claims that either neglect nuance or are unsupported by the articles they link to, that they criticize certain articles that support high cost of r&d but do not criticize articles that show low cost of r&d, and the use of either misleading, wrong or unexplained data points makes me strongly think this is a biased article