Annual 'Shkreli Awards' highlight worst medical misdeeds by hospitals, doctors, pharma

Count me in whenever powerful people who take advantage of others are held to account for their actions.

And that especially goes for those in the health-care industry whose medical misdeeds can have life-and-death consequences.

Thanks to the Lown Institute, a health-care think tank based in Boston, Mass., we now know who were 2023’s most egregious offenders.

That’s because earlier this month, it released its seventh edition of the “Shkreli Awards” — given annually to perpetrators of the most egregious examples of "profiteering and dysfunction in health care."

The awards are named for infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, known for obtaining the manufacturing rights to the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and marking up its price by more than 5,000%. (Shkreli was later convicted of securities fraud unrelated to the Daraprim scandal and sentenced to federal prison.)

The recipients of the Shkrelis are chosen by a panel of judges made up of health policy experts, clinicians, journalists, and patient advocates.

Lown Institute presented its full list of 2023 health-care “fails” on Jan. 9 in an online livestream.

More health care red flags: Florida Shuffle: State's failure to oversee addiction treatment leaves patients in deadly danger

So without any further ado, here is a curated list of 2023’s Shkreli Award recipients:

Threatening to send comatose patient out of the country

Lown Institute explained that a Philadelphia Inquirer story detailed how Lehigh Valley Health Cedar Crest Hospital told the family of a patient who was an undocumented immigrant and was still in a coma weeks after brain-aneurysm surgery that they would need “to pay $500 per day for the equipment they would need to care for her at home, find another facility that would take her, or consent to a ‘medical deportation’ to the Dominican Republic.”

Loud protestations from patient advocates and the local immigrant community helped the patient remain in Pennsylvania, where she was transferred to a different hospital.

“Cruelty is like wrong-sided surgery. It has to be a never event,” said one Lown Institute panelist.

Testing medical devices on a poor patient

According to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Rodney White, a surgeon at Harbor UCLA Medical Center, a hospital that serves mostly lower-income patients and people of color, convinced a patient to have two experimental $15,000 Medtronic devices implanted even though her condition may not have warranted such a procedure.

White was reported to have received payment from Medtronic to promote the device.

What ended up happening was tragic: The patient, Bernetta Higgins, a law firm employee, ended up having a stroke and months later was still learning how to talk, read and write again.

Hospitals allegedly 'dumping' sick, homeless patients on the street 

Even though there’s a California law preventing the practice, a San Diego Tribune story detailed “how hospitals are regularly engaging in ‘patient dumping’ of homeless people." One activist told the paper that she’d seen it happen to at least 500 homeless people.

In Louisville, Kentucky, a TV station reported on a similar practice happening in its city.

One homeless man who had a shattered hip and pelvis from a car accident and was left to fend for himself after being dropped off at a homeless shelter instead of a rehab facility told the station “it’s like I’m a worthless man … We’re garbage.”

More on the treatment of homeless: James, Warren defend West Palm's homeless assistance amid criticism of feeding ordinance

The dirty little secret about Zantac 

While the original heartburn medicine Zantac became one of the most popular over-the-counter medications of all time, reports from Bloomberg noted that there’s evidence — including manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline’s own research — dating back to the 1980s that its usage “could result in the formation of a dangerous carcinogenic compound.”

It took all the way until 2019 for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to finally take action and force the medication off the market.

Since then, Zantac has been sued — and settled — for what analysts estimate will eventually be around $5 billion.

Predictably, however, GlaxoSmithKline has pushed back against the whole scandal, saying in a statement that it “does not admit any liability in the settlements and will continue to vigorously defend itself based on the facts and the science in all other Zantac cases.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s reporting also noted that, as a reformulated Zantac was introduced to store shelves in 2021, the drug’s original active ingredient has been repurposed in a different scientific way: It’s now being given to laboratory rats in order to induce cancer.

‘Nonprofit’ hospital CEO earns $35.5 million

According to a report by StatNews, CommonSpirit Health, the largest Catholic health system in the U.S., paid CEO Lloyd Dean $35.5 million in 2021.

As the Lown Institute pointed out “for comparison, Dean’s total pay was nearly $15 million more than the CEO of the largest FOR-profit health system, HCA Healthcare,” with one of its expert panelists noting “anybody who is still believes that nonprofit hospitals are more community minded than for-profit systems need look no further than the Catholic hospitals.”

Dean has since left his position.

Columbia OB-GYN sexually assaults patients — despite years of complaints

A joint Propublica/New York Magazine report said that despite evidence of an ongoing problem, Columbia University OB-GYN Dr. Robert Hadden assaulted patients for years with little intervention by the administration.

Lown Institute noted that “overall, more than 245 patients have come forward to allege abuse, including one woman whom Hadden had delivered as a baby.”

In July 2023, the Hadden was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for inducing four women to travel across state lines for unlawful sexual contact in his office.

The university has since agreed to pay more than $235 million to settle two separate lawsuits while admitting no responsibility in the matter.

“When you see all these stories in one place, they stop being anecdotes and start to tell a bigger story,” said Lown Institute President Dr. Vikas Saini. “The need for more fairness and integrity in U.S. health care couldn’t be clearer.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Lown Institute Shkreli Awards name 'worst in healthcare profiteering and dysfunction'