During this 33 minute conversation Dr. Saini and Ms. Garber discuss CEO bonuses during the pandemic, discuss generally CEO compensation as an outlier in the nonprofit sector, discuss the substance of their research findings including what explains CEO compensation and conclude by discussing what criteria should be used in calculating CEO compensation. More
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
Do nonprofit hospitals have higher unreimbursed Medicaid costs than for-profit hospitals? More
Patient advocates and researchers uncover concerning patterns in financial relationships between industry funding and patient advocacy organizations. More
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
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
What are we rewarding hospital CEOs for -- and what metrics could drive their salaries on instead? In an recent piece in Health Affairs Forefront, Vikas Saini, Judith Garber, and Shannon Brownlee from the Lown Institute share findings from the Lown Hospitals Index on pay equity at nonprofit hospitals. More
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
Enjoy these Shkreli Award "dishonorable mentions" — nominees that didn't quite make the top ten, but are worth calling out nonetheless. More
A top ten list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care, named for Martin Shkreli, the price-hiking "pharma bro" that everyone loves to hate. More
A top ten list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care, named for Martin Shkreli, the price-hiking "pharma bro" that everyone loves to hate. More
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.
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.”
A recently-released Congressional committee report on drug prices reveals some outrageous business practices by pharma -- here's what they found. More
The 2021 hospital price transparency rule may not end the price confusion for patients, but it's still a valuable change-- here's why... More
Being able to do an experiment over again and confirm the results is actually a crucial aspect of science, called reproducibility. Unfortunately, a shockingly large proportion of cancer biology studies we do may not be reproducible, a new study shows. More
Which hospitals got the largest slice of the federal relief pie? Two recent studies examine the impact of this massive funding influx on hospital finances. More
A recent Reuters investigation found that a campaign to lower the A1c target for diabetes was driven largely by pharmaceutical companies, to create a bigger market for their new blood sugar-lowering drugs. More
How can we improve hospital cost efficiency to get better outcomes for a lower cost? Watch the video recording of our launch event to see the discussion. More
A recent study examines insurer-negotiated prices for ten expensive drugs at the 20 top US News & World Report hospitals. More