The Shkreli Awards are handed out each year by the Lown Institute, a “nonpartisan think tank advocating bold ideas for a just a caring system for health.” The awards are a lot like the igNobel Prizes; you probably do not want to be on this list, which is the worst ten examples of “profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare” in the US. Narrowing it down to just ten must be pretty difficult in a nation that’s chosen profit over…well, everything else, including decency, effective care, and rationality.
There are some horrendous items on the list.
The North Texas Health Science Center collected dead bodies from local hospitals, dissected them, and supplied the body parts to medical students and companies like Medtronic. They evidently decided that finding the families of the deceased would be too much trouble (read: too expensive) so they didn’t bother.
Memorial Medical Center in New Mexico used to be nonprofit, but now it’s just a business, owned by Apollo Global Management, a private equity cesspool. When they were a nonprofit hospital, people with cancer would go there for treatment, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles. They used to have a financial assistance program to help with the costs. Not any more. In 2024 they turned cancer patients away unless they paid in advance — even if they had health insurance. This is not a healthcare system; it’s a sales operation with some doctors and nurses in the back room.
Of course United Healthcare is on the list, at #2. “Doctors interviewed by STAT report pressure to reduce time with patients and to practice aggressive medical coding tactics that make patients seem as sick as possible.” And United Healthcare has nearly 100,000 doctors under its corporate thumb.
The winner (or loser) at #1 is Ralph de la Torre, who was CEO of Steward Health Care that operated a series of hospitals in Massachusetts. It was another private equity scam. Many of the hospitals are bankrupt, leaving communities with no local healthcare facilities, but leaving de la Torre with a couple of hundred million dollars. He then ducked a US Senate committee hearing, is in contempt of Congress, and had his phone seized by federal agents. He’s also named in a criminal case in Malta, is the target of a US investigation. He’s probably relaxing on one of his super yachts. One of them is 190 feet long and docked in the Galápagos Islands, where he probably feels beyond the reach of, you know, civilized behavior.
Those are just the highlights I cherry-picked. Why have Americans put up with this kind of activity (and this kind of health care) for so many years?
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