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Accountability
March 5, 2022

Surgeons work to keep fading American shopping malls alive

The health care industry will soon be offering elective surgery where Americans once bought their underpants. “There is a certain logic to it,” said Vikas Saini, a cardiologist who is head of the Lown Institute, a think tank. He sees it as part of a general trend “towards the commercialisation of healthcare”. Dr Saini thinks that malls in wealthier suburbs might hold a particular allure for hospitals. “The most desirable patient is the upscale patient who is healthy, who has commercial insurance and who can get some kind of elective surgery, like their knee or something, that’s very lucrative,” he said. More

Accountability
February 11, 2022

‘An ever-spiraling upward cycle’: nonprofit hospital CEOs paid 8 times more than average worker

The pandemic has brought hospital finances and pay scales to greater attention as burned out healthcare workers call for higher pay after two years of COVID-19, though hospital CEOs have faced scrutiny for years over sky-high compensation. "Today, hospital boards compare the compensation of their CEOs not to other community-based nonprofits but to their for-profit publicly traded hospital CEO peers, who themselves are compared to leaders in the largest industrial and financial companies trading on Wall Street," the researchers said. "Since many boards set CEO salary by obtaining 'comparable' salary data, this becomes an ever-spiraling upward cycle." More

Accountability
February 10, 2022

Lown Institute: 7 questions to guide decisions on hospital CEO pay

Amid the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an opportunity for boards of nonprofit hospitals to rethink how their CEOs are paid, particularly compared to the staff at their facilities, representatives with the Lown Institute wrote in a Feb. 10 article published in Health Affairs. The Lown Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank, examined the gap between the pay of hospital staff and the CEO, as well as the implications of it. More

Accountability
January 18, 2022

After China, Mass General Brigham is hungry to grow back home

MGB's continuing expansion raises questions about the underlying values of nonprofit hospitals. If you’re a hospital with tax-exempt status, “you could be asking, ‘what are you doing locally for the community?‘ ” Saini told me. “Or, you can figure out where there are paying customers and build a clinic.” On one hand, MGB simply embodies the market-driven spirit of American health care: “They have to find revenue, and the revenue is fragmented in terms of geography and social class,” said Saini. More

Accountability
January 1, 2022

How Brigham Health helped create a Chinese hospital for elites — and almost nobody came

Brigham is among the worst of more than 3,000 US hospitals in providing community benefits like health education and clinics, according to the Lown Institute, a Needham-based health care think tank.

Nonprofit hospitals like the Brigham, with tax-exempt status, should not be trying to “suck up wealth in other countries to subsidize unaffordable health care here,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, Lown’s president.

Brigham’s Evergrande project, he said, “would probably be the most egregious example of what we have been talking about.”

“This is catering to elites, and the elites didn’t show up,” he said.

More

Accountability
December 20, 2021

Biogen Slashes Price of Alzheimer’s Drug Aduhelm, as It Faces Obstacles

A group of Alzheimer’s experts and health advocates called on the Food and Drug Administration to pull Aduhelm off the market and said they were supporting an effort to file a formal petition with the agency to withdraw it.

“The F.D.A.’s decision to approve Aduhelm is indefensible in both scientific and clinical terms,” said a statement signed by 18 scientists, most of them doctors. “This drug should be withdrawn from the market immediately.”

The doctors and scientists who signed the statement also agreed to provide their expertise to support the filing of a citizen petition, a formal process to seek reversal of the F.D.A.’s decision. The petition will be filed by the Right Care Alliance, a coalition of clinicians, patients and community members, which is also circulating a pledge for physicians who promise not to prescribe Aduhelm and for patients and family members who say they will not request it. Dr. Vikas Saini, chairman of the Right Care Alliance and president of the Lown Institute, a health care think tank, said that while the citizen petition process can take months or years, it can prompt F.D.A. action.   More