Our contract awards BIW the exclusive right to decide its employees’ healthcare provider.1 The Cigna Group insures BIW employees. This year, Cigna “won” 7th place in the Lown Institute’s Shkreli Awards. The awards are named for Martin Shkreli. Shkreli is infamous for price gouging life-saving drugs. Rina Torchinsky wrote for NPR:
“While he was head of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Shkreli notoriously raised the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim, an antiparasitic medication commonly used by AIDS patients and others with suppressed immune systems, from $13.50 per pill to $750.”2
Torchinsky noted this was a 5,000% increase. The annual Shkreli Awards have highlighted egregious behaviors by medical insurers ever since. This year, Cigna won 7th place. The Lown Institute wrote:
“When Sara England’s infant son Amari experienced severe respiratory distress two months after open-heart surgery, doctors at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California, determined he required immediate specialized care. Amari was put on a ventilator and doctors arranged for an air ambulance transfer to a medical center in San Francisco, KFF Health News reported. The boy eventually recovered and returned home, but that’s when England got another shock. Cigna, her insurer, had refused to cover the 86-mile flight, leaving the family stuck with a bill for $97,599.
“While the No Surprises Act of 2022 is supposed to protect patients from exorbitant out-of-network charges that come from situations like this, if an insurer deems the service “not medically necessary,” as Cigna did in this case, patients can still be on the hook for the bill. According to England, a Cigna representative reached out to offer assistance with the appeals process and told her the insurer attempted to contact the ambulance provider but had been unable to resolve the bill with them. In an email, the reporter told the Lown Institute that England said her final appeal was denied.”3
- Agreement between Bath Iron Works and Local S6: August 21, 2023 to August 23, 2026 (Bath Iron Works, 2023), 5. ↩︎
- Rina Torchinsky, “‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli has been released from prison,” NPR, May 19, 2022. ↩︎
- “2024 Shkreli Awards,” Lown Institute, January 7, 2025. ↩︎
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