The Lown institute keeps an eye on fraud, waste, and dysfunction in American healthcare, and every year they present the Shkreli awards, named for infamous pharmabro Martin Shkreli. Here we summarize the top 10 terrible operators of 2024.
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"The whole idea that that there's a functioning market is a fantasy," Saini said "Given that fact, the way money flows is not at all rational, and that's why we get what we get in terms of the prices of everything."
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From selling deceased patients' body parts to denying cancer treatment over upfront payments, the Lown Institute's annual Shkreli Awards spotlight the most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in American healthcare. Dr. Vikas Saini, President of the Lown Institute, walks us through 2024's "winners" and what they reveal about the state of our healthcare system.
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We’re bringing you highlights from this year’s ceremony – featuring things like human bones for sale without the consent of the deceased or their families, phantom urinary catheters, and so much more – and some reflections from the Lown Institute’s president, Dr. Vikas Saini.
“Showing all these stories together paints a picture of a health care system in desperate need of transformation,” Saini said at the ceremony. “Not just because the stories are shocking, but because often what they're depicting, like Martin Shkreli's infamous price hike, is perfectly legal.”
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his is the eighth year in which the awards have been given. Winners are chosen by a panel including doctors, public health experts, journalists, and patient advocates. The awards are named after Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” who became infamous when he bought the maker of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim and increased the price 50-fold.
Speaking at the ceremony, Lown Institute president Vikas Saini said, “All these stories paint a picture of a healthcare industry in desperate need of transformation. Doing these awards every year shows us that this is nothing new.”
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"Every year we are dumbfounded by the amount of profiteering" that candidates for these awards engaged in, Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, told MedPage Today. "It's always a mixture of out-and-out fraud as well as just general venality and grasping."
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This set of Shkreli Award winners is the institute's eighth installment, but the level of outrageousness in the actions of this year's candidates is the most disturbing, Saini said. There are "regulators and people in positions of authority whose jobs they are supposed to do, but instead they turn and look the other way. A lot of this stuff that happens is because there's no cops on the beat."
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“All these stories paint a picture of a healthcare industry in desperate need of transformation. In 2024, healthcare practices were put in the spotlight,” Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, said during the ceremony. “But doing these awards every year shows us that this is nothing new. We’re hoping that these stories illuminate what changes are needed.”
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Ten individuals, groups, practices and organizations are recognized in the name of a "pharma bro" with the release of Lown Institute's Shkreli Awards.
The 8th Annual list contains the "most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare," decided by a panel of 20 judges who are patient activists, clinicians, health policy experts and journalists. The awards are organized by Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that measures hospitals' and health systems' social responsibility.
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A south Alabama hospital was highlighted in a recent report as performing one of the highest rates of unnecessary back surgeries in the country.
Over 37% of the spinal fusions performed at Mobile Infirmary were considered to be ‘unnecessary’ by the Lown Institute, a non-partisan think-tank in Massachusetts that releases an annual hospital ranking focused on patient safety and the value of care.
The national rate of spinal fusion overuse is 14%, according to the analysis.
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Hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries over a three-year period, according to an analysis by the Lown Institute, a health care watchdog group. The useless treatments put patients at risk for complications and cost Medicare about $2 billion, the analysis found. Furthermore, there was a large variation in rates of overuse among individual hospitals, ranging from zero to more than half of procedures.
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A report last week from the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, found hospitals and physicians performed over 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries over three years, based on three years’ worth of Medicare and Medicare Advantage claims data. Those procedures cost Medicare about $2 billion between 2019 and 2022, the report said.
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A new analysis revealed that Medicare spent roughly $2 billion over three years on unnecessary back surgeries for older adults. This alarming figure comes from research conducted by the nonpartisan Lown Institute think tank.
The study examined common procedures including spinal fusion, laminectomy, and vertebroplasty, finding that an unnecessary back surgery is performed on a Medicare beneficiary every eight minutes. More than 200,000 procedures were identified as potentially unnecessary during the study period.
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Over 200,000 back surgeries were performed unnecessarily in the United States over the course of three years, according to a new Lown Institute report. In sum, these low-value back procedures cost Medicare about $2 billion after three years, roughly $600 million annually.
“We trust that our doctors make decisions based on the best available evidence, but that’s not always the case,” Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, said in an organizational release. “In spinal surgery, as with other fields of medicine, physicians routinely overlook evidence to make exceptions, sometimes at shockingly high rates. This type of waste in Medicare is costly, both in terms of spending, and in risk to patients.”
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Hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. over three years, according to a new analysis.
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In the last three years, U.S. hospitals performed more than 200,000 unnecessary back surgeries on Medicare beneficiaries, according to a Nov. 14 report by the Lown Institute Hospital Index.
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While Harris and Walz have challenged corporate power, politicians do so only because voters are pushing for it, cautioned Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a health-care think tank.
“The health-care corporations now are mega-regional players. They have huge clout. It would really take much more than a single politician,” Saini said. “It’s going to take a broader movement in the country. … Maybe we’ll get there as there is a lot of pain.”
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Fixing American healthcare will require more than mere tweaks around the edges. Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Boston-based Lown Institute, believes that it will require a return to medicine’s humanist roots. In this interview he describes some of the ways in which many healthcare organizations prioritize revenue and profit over patients and communities. He also explains why he remains optimistic that Hippocratic principles will ultimately prevail.
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