NEW YORK (Reuters) - Health care companies are taking a step back to better understand patients' experiences after a powerful U.S. health insurance executive was murdered last week, executives from drugmaker Pfizer (NYSE: PFE ) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN ) said at a panel at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Wednesday.
The murder ignited an outpouring of anger from Americans struggling to receive and pay for medical care.
"Our health system needs to be better ... There's a lot of things that should cause a lot of outrage," Amazon Pharmacy Chief Medical (TASE: PMCN ) Officer Vin Gupta said. "It's also true that that (killing) should not have happened. There cannot be this false moral equivalence in our discourse."
Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH )'s insurance arm, one of the largest health insurers in the U.S., was shot dead on the morning of Dec. 4 outside a hotel in Manhattan in what police said was a targeted attack.
Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged with the murder was arrested earlier this week in possession of a handwritten manifesto that offered insight into his mindset, according to police. The New York Times (NYSE: NYT ) reported that an internal New York City Police report analyzing the document concluded that Mangione viewed the killing as a justified response to what he believed to be corruption in the healthcare industry.
Recent data show that patients are now even more likely to have their claims denied, pay more for premiums and medical visits, and face unexpected costs for care they thought was covered by their health plan. Insurers say they work to negotiate down increased fees from doctors and hospitals, as well as costly prescription drugs and medical devices.
"I think all of us are taking a step back and trying to understand what's happening with patients and their experiences," Pfizer Chief Sustainability Officer Caroline Roan said.
She called the murder "a tragedy of epic proportions" and said that executives in the healthcare industry were reeling.
"Clearly there's a larger dialogue that needs to happen, and we're going to be taking our time to try to understand exactly what happened and understand that feedback, and see where we can play a positive role."
Health insurance companies are also reassessing the risks for their top executives after the murder. Some have removed photos of their leadership teams from their websites and are considering whether and how to increase security measures.
Still, Amazon's Gupta said that despite problems with the U.S. healthcare system, actions like Thompson's murder cannot be normalized.
"Last week was horrifically shocking," he said. "Are there going to be copycats? That is unacceptable. We need people to speak out that false moral equivalences must not be accepted. We should be also be focused on the bigger goal which is that we can do something better here together."
Thompson, a father of two, had been CEO of UnitedHealthcare since April 2021, part of a 20-year career with the company. He had been in New York to attend the company's annual investor conference.
The suspected shooter has also drawn intense interest from online sleuths seeking to understand how a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from a prominent family ended up an accused murderer. Clues into Mangione’s own medical history include a potential back injury that could cause both personal distress and difficulties obtaining insurance coverage for treatment.
To view the live broadcast of the World Stage go to the Reuters NEXT news page: (This story has been refiled to fix a typo in paragraph 6)