A masked gunman in New York City killed the CEO of one of America's largest insurers Wednesday.
Police report the morning attack on 50-year-old Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was planned. The shooter waited outside a hotel that was hosting a company conference in midtown Manhattan.
Columbus drug pricing expert and former lobbyist for the Ohio Pharmacists Association Antonio Ciaccia remembers Thompson as grounded and thoughtful, traits he said are uncommon in the upper echelons of the healthcare industry.
Ciaccia met Thompson when he came to Ohio during a state controversy involving pharmacy intermediaries. Then state-auditor and current Attorney General Dave Yost found overcharges in the program, Ciaccia explained. Intermediaries were paying pharmacies one price, then billing Medicaid plans significantly more in a practice called spread pricing.
At the time, Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealthcare's Medicaid division. He came to Ohio to talk with the pharmacy community to find areas of commonality, Ciaccia said.
"I'm used to encountering folks in the industry that, you know, are full of empty talk. And he was not one of them,” Ciaccia said of Thompson.
Ciaccia's conversation with Thompson turned to using pharmacists for patient care. Thompson and his team ultimately helped create a program to pay pharmacists to help underserved groups in new ways. The program started as a pilot in northeastern Ohio before UnitedHealthcare expanded it to all of its in-network Medicaid providers.
"I found him to be a very down-to-earth guy in a business where there does not seem to be very many down-to-earth people,” Ciaccia said.
Ciaccia said the pharmacy initiative was so successful that the Medicaid program started similar incentives.
“It became a catalyst to move forward the profession of pharmacy from a clinical perspective, but then again, more importantly, provide a higher level of service to the patients who use those pharmacies,” he said.
Ciaccia called Thompson's death a tragedy.
News reports on Wednesday said that the shooter left a message on the ammunition: the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose.” Some believe the words are a reference to the strategies insurance companies use to avoid paying claims.
Ciaccia, who is CEO of 46brooklyn Research, a nonprofit that improves accessibility to U.S. drug pricing data, said he believes the nation’s healthcare delivery system has a lot of problems and there is plenty of blame to go around.
“But at no point could I ever say that there's any one individual who's responsible, especially when considering that our system is explicitly designed to yield many of the things that many people don't like,” Ciaccia said. “There’s no actual reasonable cause for this type of turn of events.”
