EP310: The 2020 Shkreli Awards for the Worst Examples of Profiteering and Dysfunction in Health Care, With Vikas Saini, MD, and Shannon Brownlee

The Shkreli Awards have been published each year, for the past five years and counting, by the Lown Institute. The Shkreli Awards are a much-anticipated top 10 list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care. This year’s list, celebrating the most excellently egregious profiteering in 2020, are unique in the sense that everybody on this list this year—every one of them—decided, deliberately, that a pandemic might be a super opportunistic global stroke of luck to exploit fear and anguish to line their own pockets.

The list is named for Martin Shkreli, the price-hiking “pharma bro” that is easy to point to as a model of pure, unadulterated health care profiteering. Here’s the point: Just because you can be clever and shifty enough to make a whole lot of money in health care doesn’t mean you should. Every dollar anyone earns without adding commensurate value back is just one more nail in the financially toxic coffin that patients and employers face in this country—and taxpayers.

The Lown Institute is a nonpartisan think tank advocating bold ideas for a just and caring system for health. Their work is centered around four main topics: low-value or unnecessary care, accountability, health equity, and the human connection.

In this health care podcast, I am looking so forward to speaking with Vikas Saini, MD, and Shannon Brownlee from the Lown Institute about this year’s Shkreli Award winners. (I wish I had a soundtrack of audience clapping. I’d cue it right now.) There are 10 winners, and we talk about most of them in this episode.

You can learn more by connecting with Dr. Saini (@DrVikasSaini) and Shannon (@ShannonBrownlee) on Twitter. 

Vikas Saini, MD, is president of the Lown Institute. He is a clinical cardiologist trained by Dr. Bernard Lown at Harvard, where he has taught and done research. He has also been an entrepreneur as scientific cofounder of Aspect Medical Systems, the pioneer in noninvasive consciousness monitoring in the operating room with the BIS device. He was in private practice in cardiology for over 15 years on Cape Cod, where he also founded a primary care physician network participating in global payment contracts.

Dr. Saini is board certified in cardiovascular disease, internal medicine, and nuclear cardiology. He has served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he initiated the first course focused on policy translation for cardiovascular disease prevention.

Shannon Brownlee is senior vice president of the Lown Institute. She and Lown Institute President Dr. Vikas Saini are cofounders of the Right Care Alliance, a network of activist patients, clinicians, and community leaders devoted to organizing a broad-based movement for a radically better health care system. Before joining the Lown Institute, Brownlee served as acting director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation. As a senior fellow at New America, she published the groundbreaking book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which was named the best economics book of 2007 by the New York Times.