Democrats are pessimistic that Congress will enact new rules around the health insurance industry, even as they try to appear responsive to growing calls for reform following the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose murder unleashed a torrent of anger on social media against the U.S. health system, and insurance companies specifically. While politicians have roundly comdemned the violence, the apparent assassination has exposed the deep cynicism with which much of the public, on the right and the left, sees the insurance industry.
Health care did not play a big role in the election that's sending President Trump back to the White House and giving Republicans control of Congress. That doesn't mean Congress will avoid the topic next year.
Critics are torching a New York Times op-ed by the CEO of UnitedHealthcare's parent company, arguing that the $23.5 million-salaried executive's message overwhelmingly ignored the failures actively perpetuated by his company in the American healthcare system. UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty condemned the American public's gleeful response to the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was assassinated by a masked gunman last week on the streets of New York City just hours before an investor meeting. In roughly 600 words, he also attempted to deflect his insurance network's responsibility in the growing inequity in America's health care system, vaguely pointing to a "patchwork" of failures decades in the making while swearing that his corporate network—which reported $22 billion in profits in 2023 alone, nearly three times the figure reported by CVS, the second-most-profitable health insurance company that year—was consistently fighting to "deliver high-quality care and lower costs." But readers weren't buying it.
In early 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson had an urgent warning for his colleagues: The company has a public relations problem. Average Americans didn't understand the massive insurance company's role in the nation's health system, Thompson argued in internal discussions and with fellow executives, including steps it had taken to eliminate out-of-pocket costs for lifesaving drugs, colleagues said. Instead, UnitedHealthcare and its parent, UnitedHealth Group, faced investigations, a congressional probe and simmering consumer anger over charges it was making billions by denying healthcare to the ill and the elderly.
Healthcare did not play a big role in the election that's sending President Trump back to the White House and giving Republicans control of Congress. That doesn't mean Congress will avoid the topic next year.
Johnson & Johnson has sued divisions of health insurer Cigna, accusing them of working with a drug-benefit middleman to drain J&J financial-assistance funds earmarked for patients taking some of its pricier drugs. The move by J&J widens litigation the healthcare giant initiated in 2022 against a middleman, SaveOnSP LLC, and is a new flare-up of long-running tension over drug prices among manufacturers, insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers and other middlemen in recent years. J&J added Express Scripts, which is a PBM, and specialty pharmacy Accredo—both units of Cigna—as defendants in an amended lawsuit that J&J filed under seal in federal court in New Jersey earlier this year. The amended lawsuit was unsealed in late November. The pharmaceutical company claims that the Cigna units worked on a program with SaveOn that caused J&J to pay more than $100 million in drug copay assistance than it would have otherwise. J&J is seeking monetary damages in an amount to be determined at trial, and a court order that the companies stop the program.