UnitedHealth chief admits US health system ‘does not work as well as it should’

The leader of the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, whose chief executive officer was shot to death outside a New York City hotel on 4 December, conceded that the US’s patchwork health system “does not work as well as it should”.

But in a guest essay published by the New York Times, UnitedHealth Group’s CEO, Andrew Witty, maintained the slain Brian Thompson cared about customers and was working to make the system better.

Thompson was ambushed and fatally shot outside a hotel where his company was holding its annual investor conference, a killing that has been viewed as a violent expression of widespread anger at the insurance industry.

Witty said people at the company were struggling to make sense of the killing, as well as the vitriol and threats directed at colleagues. He made it a point to say he understood people’s frustration – yet described Thompson as part of the solution rather than someone deserving scorn.

Thompson never forgot growing up in his family’s farmhouse in Iowa and focused on improving the experiences of consumers, he wrote.

“His dad spent more than 40 years unloading trucks at grain elevators. BT, as we knew him, worked farm jobs as a kid and fished at a gravel pit with his brother. He never forgot where he came from, because it was the needs of people who live in places like Jewell, Iowa, that he considered first in finding ways to improve care,” Witty wrote.

Witty said his company shares some responsibility for lack of understanding of coverage decisions.

“We know the health system does not work 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 did. It’s a patchwork built over decades,” Witty wrote. “Our mission is to help make it work better.”

Nonetheless, he said it was unfair that the company’s workers had been barraged with threats even while grieving the loss of a colleague.

“No employees – be they the people who answer customer calls or nurses who visit patients in their homes – should have to fear for their and their loved ones’ safety,” he wrote.

Witty’s comments were published after a woman in Lakeland, Florida, was charged with threatening a worker at her own health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, during a phone call on 10 December. Police said she cited words Thompson’s killer wrote on shell casings and said “you people are next” during the recorded call.

Police say Thompson’s killer approached him from behind and shot him before fleeing on a bicycle.

A suspect, Luigi Mangione, was later arrested in Pennsylvania and is fighting attempts to extradite him to New York so he can face a murder charge in Thompson’s killing.

The day after the slaying, police in San Francisco gave the FBI a potentially valuable tip about the identity of the suspect: he looked like a man who had been reported missing to them in November, Luigi Mangione, as the Associated Press reported.

San Francisco police provided Mangione’s name to the FBI on 5 December, the AP reported, citing a law enforcement official who was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and agreed to speak to the outlet on the condition of anonymity.

That was the day the NYPD released surveillance images showing the face of the suspected shooter as he checked into a Manhattan hostel. Mangione was arrested on 9 December.

Thompson’s survivors include a widow and two sons aged 16 and 19.

The Associated Press contributed reporting