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

In Episode 310, Stacey Richter talks with Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, and Shannon Brownlee, senior vice president of the Lown Institute, about the 2020 Shkreli Awards — the annual top-10 list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ How the Lown Institute selects winners for its annual Shkreli Awards

✅ Why 2020's list is unique: every winner exploited the pandemic itself for profit

✅ How pharma companies developing COVID vaccines still made the list

✅ Why private equity's business model in health care is, at its core, profiteering

✅ Why the federal government took first place on this year's Shkreli Awards list

WHY THIS MATTERS

The Shkreli Awards, named for "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli, exist to call out health care profiteering that's often perfectly legal but still deeply unethical. As Dr. Saini and Shannon Brownlee point out, 2020's list stands out because every winner made a deliberate choice to treat a pandemic as an opportunity to exploit fear and anguish for profit. Every dollar earned without adding commensurate value back is, in their words, one more nail in the financially toxic coffin patients, employers, and taxpayers are stuck facing — and building a radically better health care system requires people to stop being shy about naming these issues publicly.

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

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=== CONNECT WITH THE RHV TEAM ===

✭ LinkedIn ✭ Threads ✭ Bluesky ✭ X

00:00 Introduction.

02:51 "COVID was like … just a glare of x-ray that revealed everything … going on in the health care system."

05:14 "There's always profiteering whenever there's a buck to be made."

05:33 Is profiteering in the health care system deteriorating?

06:07 How did the winners of the 2020 Shkreli Awards get chosen?

07:18 "The categories that this falls into is really the stakeholders in health care."

08:11 What did Connecticut internist Steven Murphy, MD, do to earn his place at #8 on the awards list?

09:29 How did big pharma companies (some of which have been developing COVID vaccines) like Pfizer get on the Shkreli Awards list?

11:16 "We do have to start asking some hard questions about who is supposed to benefit from the … public funding that goes into these kinds of products—vaccines and drugs."

12:49 "The thing about private equity … is that the business model really is profiteering in health care."

19:43 Why did the federal government win the first place in the Shkreli Awards?

24:13 "Most of this is not illegal. It's merely unethical."

26:56 "There really is a radically better health care system that's possible, but we're not really going to get there if people are shy about talking publicly about some of these issues."