What we learned about Brian Thompson, slain UnitedHealthcare CEO

He's become a symbol. He was also a person.

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Last Friday morning, I got on the phone with someone who knew Brian Thompson.

It was part of our continued reporting on the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s shocking death — not just what happened on the streets of Manhattan, but what the reaction revealed. I’ve done a few dozen calls with friends and colleagues of Thompson since he was shot and killed two weeks ago today.

The original purpose of Friday’s call was to chase a tip I’d heard. But maybe 10 minutes into our conversation, the person mentioned something else entirely: that Brian Thompson helped set up something called the Provider Relief Fund in the early days of the nation’s pandemic response.

It was early 2020. America had shut down. Federal officials were trying to get billions of dollars in emergency payments to health care providers that were at risk of going bankrupt. They couldn’t find a partner to distribute the funds.

Then Thompson told desperate officials that UnitedHealthcare could handle it — and do it ASAP.

It was a bit of a whoa for me.

The Provider Relief Fund wasn’t perfect. Watchdogs have flagged its overpayments; lawmakers later grew upset with how its money was being used.

But it’s also clear that the relief fund, hastily assembled and distributed, helped keep many health-care providers afloat during a national emergency. It was broadly seen as a good thing.

And Brian Thompson was the guy who said yes to it even as some other leaders said no.

That’s one of the nuggets that found its way into a story that I did with my colleagues Annie Gowen and Yeganeh Torbati over the weekend. It’s about the Brian Thompson that his friends and colleagues knew — including how he fretted about his company’s public image, darkly foreshadowing this month’s national reaction.

The story is available here:

Before shooting, Brian Thompson worried about UnitedHealth’s negative image

One reminder from every phone call that went into this reporting: Brian Thompson was a person, not a caricature. That doesn’t make him perfect, and UnitedHealthcare needs our continued scrutiny. (More on that in a moment.)

But there are people who knew him, are grieving him, sometimes weeping on the phone with us as they describe him.

I posted our article on X and Bluesky, and it was interesting to receive strikingly different reactions to our article, refracted through each platform.¹

I heard from many folks who appreciated learning more about Thompson, calling it necessary balance. I also got replies from people who remain plainly uninterested, or said that the media needs to focus on the insurance industry’s practices and not a dead CEO. Others suggested that the article was somehow planted by UnitedHealthcare. (This is me paraphrasing, at times, some pretty coarse rebukes.)

Regardless of what’s spilling out on social media, several polls suggest that most people — even people who dislike health insurers — don’t think shooting a health-care executive was justified.

And to underline a point: no one told us what to write or what angles to pursue. No one at UnitedHealthcare, its parent company UnitedHealth Group, or any of their associated companies tipped me on the Provider Relief Fund work. The person who first mentioned Thompson’s role setting up the fund doesn’t work for them. (And as far as I can tell, never did.)

I believe it’s possible to find the nuance here.

We need to scrutinize UnitedHealth on its practices and be skeptical of its size — as we did, repeatedly this year, and will continue to do.

Here’s what I said to Mary Harris, host of Slate’s terrific “What Next” podcast, when she had me on her show last week.

I went through earlier this year and looked at all the subsidiaries that UnitedHealth Group has. It’s 2,200 different, smaller companies. This is just a company where the tentacles have spread across the system…

Increasingly, Mary, we don’t have a U.S. health system. We have a health system that is being run by UnitedHealth in all of these different ways.

That scrutiny isn’t going away. A day after our story ran, my colleague Peter Whoriskey published a piece that examined the insurance-industry tactics that have angered so many Americans.

At the same time, a man was killed in a high-profile shooting that riveted America. Brian Thompson leaves behind family, friends and a business record. He’s at the center of an unexpected national moment. We need to be able to cover his life, and death, too.

1. On X, the reaction seemed generally favorable toward the article. On Bluesky, there appeared to be much more mockery for the article and Thompson, to say the least.