Health care workers lament they feel accused of 'working for the evil empire': report

Health care workers expressed frustration this week, feeling branded as part of an "evil empire" following the killing of a UnitedHealthcare executive, who was gunned down outside a New York City hotel, igniting a dayslong nationwide manhunt for the assassin.

Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, gunned down Brian Thompson with a 3-D printed handgun and fled on a bicycle, authorities have said. He was nabbed days later at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania following a tip.

The shooting sent shockwaves through America, with many sharing personal stories of their own encounters with the health care industry and UnitedHealth in particular, which appears to deny the most claims among major insurance providers at about 32 percent.

The New York Times reported Wednesday night that health care leaders have expressed frustration in the days after the assassination and felt vilified.“

"Clearly the employees have been shaken," Mayor Brad Wiersum of Minnetonka, where UnitedHealthcare is based, told the Times.

A UnitedHealthcare worker who processes claims said that while she knows the country's health care system has shortcomings, she also believes she and her co-workers do everything they can to help patients within the flawed system. She said she fears for her safety and was horrified by the reaction to the cold-blooded killing.

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"Lots of us were feeling like we were horrible because we’re being accused of working for the evil empire," the employee told the Times."But we all do the best we can to do a good job in the system we are in."

Dr. Sachin H. Jain, CE of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, called it a broad "moment of reckoning for the health care industry."

"We’ve unmasked a sentiment that things need to change," said Jain.

A former executive at UnitedHealthcare’s parent company told the Times "people are traumatized, absolutely traumatized, and probably also scared."

"This is not on anybody’s map of possibilities," the executive said of Thompson's killing.

Experts have noted the "rage" people feel could portend "bad news" to come.

Adrienne LeFrance wrote in an Atlantic editorial that last week’s assassination could lead down a path of "decivilization."

“The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem,” LeFrance warned readers on Wednesday. She pointed out that the conditions that made a society susceptible to violence include “highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a heightened sense of victimhood, [and] intense partisan estrangement.”

New York University professor Scott Galloway told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night the story of the shooting was actually America's response.

"When you think about it, when you go on or think about its kind of second-level effects, I think it all reverse-engineers to one thing, Anderson. And that is — quite frankly, is income inequality. And that is when we get to the levels of income inequality we have in the United States, throughout history, they've always self-corrected. That's the good news. The bad news is the means of self-correction are usually one of three things: either war, famine, or revolution."