A former owner of the Mexico and Fulton Hospitals is getting some recognition with the release of the Lown Institute's 6th Annual Shkreli Awards.

Martin Shkreli earned the nickname of pharma bro when, in 2015, his company Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired a 62-year-old drug called Daraprim and, overnight, increased the price from about $13.50 per pill to $750. In 2017, Mr. Shkreli was convicted in federal court on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud, resulting in a 2018 sentence of seven years in prison. In 2022, a federal judge ordered Mr. Shkreli to pay $64 million for hiking the price of Daraprim and permanently banned him from serving as an executive or director at a public company in addition to a lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry.

Coming in at number 2 on the 2022 Shkreli Award's list, as decided by the Lown Institute is none other than Noble Health (Kansas City, MO). The private equity firm acquired two rural Missouri hospitals in Mexico and Fulton and closed them two yars later.Between the purchase and closure of the hospitals were supply and drug shortages that threatened patient safety and the suspension of employees' health insurance despite continued deductions from paychecks for their premiums. "Some staff members now face hundreds of thousands in medical bills because they did not know they were uninsured," Lown Institute wrote. The company is under federal investigation.