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One member of British Parliament called on the Labour government to defend the country’s revered National Health Service “with everything we have and firmly stand up to the bully in the White House” after a study published Wednesday showed the UK-US pharmaceutical trade deal brokered last year is projected to cause 229,000 excess deaths as funding is stripped away from the NHS.

“It is a complete insult to patients who are suffering and dying on hospital trolleys and waiting months for treatment,” said Helen Morgan of the Liberal Democrats Party regarding the new analysis. “We cannot afford to sit by while our NHS is picked apart by a foreign regime.”

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York, the University of Liverpool, and Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand and published in the British Medical Journal, found that £44.7 billion ($59.5 billion) will have to be diverted from health services by 2036 in order to pay for new medications under the deal.

The agreement was reached last December, with recently resigned Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government agreeing to pay 25% more for new US medications over the next decade. The NHS will double the percentage of gross domestic product that it allocates for pharmaceuticals, from 0.3% to 0.6%, with the spending increasing from 10% to 12% of the universal healthcare system’s budget.

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