UnitedHealthcare CEO killed tried to enhance ‘patchwork’ structure, exec says

recent YORK — The chief of UnitedHealth throng conceded that the patchwork U.S. health structure “does not work as well as it should” but said Friday that the insurance executive gunned down on a Manhattan sidewalk cared about customers and was working to make it better.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was killed last week, was described as benevolent and brilliant by UnitedHealth throng CEO Andrew Witty in a guest composition published in The recent York Times.

The killing has been viewed as a violent expression of widespread rage at the insurance industry. Witty said people in the corporation were struggling to make sense of the killing, as well as the vitriol and threats directed at colleagues.

Police have said that the man charged with killing Thompson, Luigi Mangione, was found with a three-page note in which he lamented the high expense of health worry in the U.S. and singled out UnitedHealthcare for its profits and size. The corporation, a division of UnitedHealth throng, is the largest U.S. health insurer. Mangione is currently being held in Pennsylvania and intends to plead not guilty to a murder expense in recent York, his lawyer has said.

Witty said he understood people’s frustration but described Thompson as part of the answer.

Thompson never forgot growing up in his household’s farmhouse in Iowa and concentrated on improving the experiences of consumers.

“His dad spent more than 40 years unloading trucks at grain elevators. B.T., 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 enhance worry,” Witty wrote.

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

“We recognize the health structure does not work as well as it should, and we comprehend people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a structure like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades,” Witty wrote. “Our mission is to assist make it work better.”

He said it was unfair that the corporation’s workers had been barraged with threats, even as they grieved the setback of a co-worker.

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

A woman in Lakeland, Florida, was charged this week with threatening a worker at her own health insurance corporation, Blue Cross Blue Shield, during a phone call. Police said she cited words Thompson’s killer wrote on shell casings and said “you people are next” during the recorded call.

Police declare the shooter waited outside the hotel, where the health insurer was holding its investor conference, early on the morning of Dec. 4. He approached Thompson from behind and shot him before fleeing on a bicycle.

Mangione was arrested Monday after being spotted at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) west of recent York City. He is fighting attempts to extradite him to recent York so he can face a murder expense in Thompson’s killing.