New Delhi, July 2 -- new medicines, previously too expensive or unavailable on the health service, finally within reach. Samuel Cross read the same deal differently. The University of Liverpool researcher and his colleagues spent months calculating what the NHS budget looks like when it commits to doubling its spending on American pharmaceuticals by 2036, and what that commitment costs the patients who depend on everything else the health service provides.

The answer, published Thursday in the British Medical Journal, is 229,000 excess deaths.

The BMJ study is the first peer-reviewed analysis to quantify the mortality cost of the December 2025 UK-US pharmaceutical deal. Under the terms of that agreement, Britain committed to raising NHS...