Relentless Health Value

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 Low