UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting Exposes Dark Reality for Industry Leadership

The shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed a dark reality that many leaders in the healthcare industry have grown accustomed to — one that involves being the target of threats, mental health issues, and even physical violence.

Chris Van Gorder, the president and CEO of Scripps Health in San Diego, told MedPage Today that it is a concern that affects everyone in his organization.

“Frankly, we receive threats frequently — most are veiled threats, former employees or others. We had a series of issues with sovereign citizen-type individuals shortly after COVID started easing up,” said Van Gorder. “We have also received ‘manifestos’ written by individuals, some who were patients, and of course unhappy family members from time to time.”

While the motives of Thompson’s killer remain unknown, his wife, Paulette, told NBC News that her husband had received “some threats,” and suggested that those threats were related to his position as the CEO of a major health insurance company. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details,” she said. “I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

Hours after his killing, Thompson’s homes also received bomb threats, according to CBS News.

Since Thompson’s death, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and CVS Health have removed some or all the information about their executive leaders from their websites. MedPage Today reached out to confirm if safety was the primary reason for those changes.

Gorder, who is a retired police officer and deputy sheriff, explained he is probably more alert to the real danger the threats he described represent, and has put in place measures to ensure the safety of the people in his organization.

“I’m probably a little better equipped with knowledge than others,” he said. “I also hired a retired FBI supervising agent as our head of security at Scripps, and he has responsibility for corporate security as well. But the shooting today did get my team’s attention.”

While Thompson’s death has drawn new attention to these kinds of threats to healthcare industry leaders, the issue has existed for years.

One high profile case involved the 2014 death of Cooper Health CEO John Sheridan and his wife Joyce in Skillman, New Jersey. The couple were found dead in their home with multiple stab wounds after local firefighters responded to a report of a fire. Initially, the county medical examiner determined the incident was a murder-suicide, but that decision was reversed after the couple’s sons — along with other local officials — challenged it.

Now, experts believe the couple was murdered and the house was set on fire to cover up the crime scene. The New Jersey attorney general’s office opened up a new investigation into the deaths in 2022.

Mental health challenges in the industry have also made news. Earlier this year, two executives of Retreat Behavioral Health — founder and CEO Peter Schorr and Chief Administrative Officer Scott Korogodsky — died by suicide days before the organization closed several branches in Connecticut without warning.

Violence has long plagued workers at every level of healthcare. In fact, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that healthcare and social assistance professionals experience the highest rates of workplace violence in the U.S.

Parsing those statistics reveals even worse outcomes for frontline healthcare workers. For example, two-thirds of emergency department physicians reported being assaulted in 2022, and nearly half of nurses reported experiencing physical violence at work, according to the American Hospital Association (AHA).

This has prompted several professional organizations, including the AHA and the American Medical Association, to increase their advocacy for further state and federal protections for healthcare workers.

In fact, the AHA has championed legislation in Congress focused on increasing protections for healthcare workers in part by establishing federal penalties for any acts of violence or intimidation targeted at healthcare workers. The legislation has versions in the House and Senate, but multiple sponsors of the bills will be leaving Congress at the end of the current term.

Despite these efforts, far fewer resources or even datasets appear available to quantify and understand the true scope of violence targeted at individuals in leadership positions in healthcare.

Cheryl Clark and Rachael Robertson contributed reporting for this story.