For a hospital that had once labored to break even, Wheeling Hospital displayed abnormally deep pockets when recruiting doctors. To lure Dr. Adam Tune, an anesthesiologist from nearby Pittsburgh who specialized in pain management, the Catholic hospital built a clinic for him to run on its campus in Wheeling, West Virginia. It paid Tune as much as $1.2 million a year—well above the salaries of 90 percent of pain management physicians across the nation, the federal government charged in a lawsuit filed this spring.
“If we’re going to solve the health care pricing problem, these kinds of practices are going to have to go away,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit that advocates for affordable care.
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Popular health news often fails to reflect the incrementalism and nuance of medical discoveries, instead hyping unproven treatments. Can we save health journalism?
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Physician practices are increasingly being bought up by private equity firms. What does this mean for quality of care and overuse?
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A new study in JAMA shows how often cardiovascular trials contain misleading information...
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Vaccine opponents often share a conviction that the health care system is more interested in profits and power than helping people. Are they wrong?
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Why the revolving door poses a serious problem for government agency regulation.
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New prescription drug delivery start-ups are bypassing the FDA's regulations on off-label marketing.
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Two years after the Open Payments tool was launched, the vast majority of patients still don't know whether their doctor receives money from industry. Why?
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In health care as well as politics, expectations of unethical behavior are often driven by unspoken rules, rather than explicit instructions.
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In the COMPare trial, researchers set out to find out how prevalent outcome reporting errors are in major journals, and how these journals respond to criticism. The results were not pretty...
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As the powerful depression drug esketamine nearly FDA approval, some researchers are concerned that the approval would be lowering the bar for clinical evidence.
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Do financial conflicts play a role in explaining the differences in recommendations for acute stroke interventions between specialty societies?
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The cost of insulin has increased over 250 percent since 2007, according to the American Diabetes Association, and patients are looking to lawmakers for relief.
Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute and co-chairman of the Right Care Alliance both based in Brookline, said a handful of drug companies create an “iron triangle” with insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers that has led to skyrocketing insulin prices.
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Our willingness to turn a blind eye to the profiteering of biotech is a moral failing, writes Dr. Vikas Saini in a Commonhealth op-ed.
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Unbridled greed and disrespect for human suffering seems to be the driver of all award winners.
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The week before Thanksgiving, in the freezing rain, a group of patients, nurses, physicians and activists, organized by the Right Care Alliance, marched on the Sanofi drug company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sanofi had been marking up its insulin products by as much as 4,500 percent over to the estimated cost of producing a single vial — and people with type 1 diabetes were starting to die. Led by grieving mothers, we carried the ashes of their children to the insulin manufacturer demanding it cut its prices.
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Do FDA rules make it too difficult for new diagnostic tests to be approved? Or is it too easy?
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A new study shows that in pharmaceutical marketing, the number of doctors you target may matter more than the amount of money you give them.
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Why can't we get better price transparency for health care services in hospitals? Because the "real" price doesn't exist...
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A drug company topped a list of the worst actors in US healthcare for the second year in a row, but other industry sectors—such as hospitals, physicians, and insurers—gained ground in the second annual Shkreli Awards.1
“This year we quite intentionally cast a wider net than just the well known and insane greed of the pharmaceutical sector,” said Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, an advocacy group that bestows the awards, in an email. “We wanted to make the point that profiteering has become rampant and is not confined to any one particular sector of the healthcare enterprise.”
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