Health care execs seek to better understand patient outrage after UnitedHealthcare killing

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.

“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 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.

“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. “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.”

To view the live broadcast of the World Stage go to the Reuters NEXT news page: