UnitedHealthcare CEO killed in New York tried to improve ‘patchwork’ system, exec says
NEW YORK– The leader of UnitedHealth Group admitted that America’s patchwork health care system is “not working as well as it should,” but said Friday that the insurance executive shot on a Manhattan sidewalk cared about customers and worked to make it better.
CEO of United Healthcare Brian Thompsonwho was killed last week was described as kind and brilliant by UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty in a guest essay published in The New York Times.
The killing is seen as a violent expression of widespread anger against the insurance industry. Witty said people in the company struggled to understand the killing, as well as the vitriol and threats against colleagues.
Police have said the man accused of killing Thompson Luigi Mangionewas found with a three-page letter lamenting the high cost of healthcare in the US and singling out UnitedHealthcare for its profits and size. The company, a division of UnitedHealth Group, is the largest U.S. health insurer. Mangione is currently being held in Pennsylvania and plans to plead not guilty to a murder charge in New York, his attorney said.
Witty said he understood people’s frustration, but described Thompson as part of the solution.
Thompson never forgot growing up on his family’s farm in Iowa and focused on improving consumer experiences.
“His father unloaded trucks at grain elevators for more than forty years. BT, as we knew him, worked on a farm as a child and fished in a gravel pit with his brother. He never forgot where he came from, for it was the needs of people living in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first when finding ways to improve care,” Witty wrote.
Witty said his company shares some responsibility for the lack of understanding of coverage decisions.
“We know the health care system isn’t working as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one has. It’s a patchwork that spans decades. has been built up for years,” Witty wrote. “Our mission is to make it work better.”
He said it was unfair that the company’s employees were inundated with threats even as they mourned the loss of a colleague.
“No employee — whether they are the people who answer customer calls or the nurses who visit patients in their homes — should have to fear for the safety of themselves and their loved ones,” he wrote.
A woman in Lakeland, Florida, does charged this week threatening an employee of her own health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, during a telephone conversation. Police said that during the recorded conversation she quoted the words Thompson’s killer had written on shell casings and said, “You’re next.”
Police say the gunman waited outside the hotel early in the morning of Dec. 4, where the health insurer was holding its investor conference. He approached Thompson from behind and shot him before fleeing on a bicycle.
Mangione was arrested Monday after he was spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles west of New York City. He fights attempts to extradite him to New York so he can face justice a murder charge in Thompson’s murder.