> biomedical progress, especially in therapeutics, has become less productive despite staggering advances in basic science.

> the inflation-adjusted cost to bring a new drug to market roughly doubles every nine years: a trend that has held since the 1950s.

Presumably they're getting at numbers of new drugs brought to market.

I'm interested in a different metric: Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) saved due primarily to new drugs brought to market.

Who cares if 1 million drugs come to market and they do little to improve lives? We'd prefer 10 that had more QALYs.