Slain UnitedHealthcare executive is remembered amid the fury sparked by his death

Amid the roaring national frustration over health insurance that has emerged since the Dec. 4 killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, colleagues are taking time to remember the fuller picture of Brian Thompson’s humanity.

Friends and co-workers of Thompson, 50, remember him as a strong leader and loving father who used humor and compassion that traced back to his roots as an Iowa farm boy. While they recognize the anxiety over the current state of health care and UnitedHealth’s outsized role as the nation’s largest health insurer, they said it’s wrong to make Thompson the focus of those problems.

“What has evolved in some corners online is just disappointing to see, because, in health care, this guy was one of the people who wanted to make things better,” said one former close colleague at UnitedHealth who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

More than 600 colleagues gathered Wednesday at company headquarters in Minnetonka to remember Thompson, known around the office as BT. A company video shared with the Minnesota Star Tribune showed he could inspire with words but also generate unscripted laughter — like when a colleague reminded him to ditch his chewing gum right before an address.

Thompson died from multiple gunshot wounds the morning of Dec. 4 after an attacker ambushed him when he was walking to a New York hotel for the start of an annual investor conference. Authorities on Monday charged Luigi Mangione with his killing and found writings suggesting the 26-year-old targeted Thompson because he was angry with large corporations, especially in the nation’s health care system.

Thompson wasn’t free from controversy, having been accused in a recent lawsuit of using insider knowledge to sell shares of UnitedHealth Group stock days before a Justice Department investigation became public. But colleagues said that doesn’t define his 20-year career at UnitedHealth Group, the parent company to the UnitedHealthcare insurance division.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Thompson volunteered the company’s resources and payment network to help the federal government route $100 billion in pandemic aid to the nation’s doctors and medical providers. Federal authorities contacted him personally seeking his help.

“He immediately knew the right thing to do and he committed the company,” the former executive said.

UnitedHealth Group has grown over the past decade into one of the nation’s largest providers of outpatient medical care, and Thompson was part of it from the start. He helped negotiate one of UnitedHealth’s first major deals in this sector to acquire a medical group in Nevada.

Thompson also spent eight years as chief financial officer and then chief executive officer for UnitedHealthcare’s Medicare business and was running the unit in 2019 when it entered the market to sell Medicare Advantage plans to seniors in Minnesota.

The nation’s health care challenges were a concern for Thompson at the societal level as well as the individual level. He asked colleagues to consider how their moms could be customers for coverage, co-workers said, and championed a navigation program to help subscribers use their benefits. Mentoring and motivating his workers was important to him.

“I wish I served up solutions that were clear-cut, that were easy to understand, easy to explain,” Thompson said in a video presentation to his workers. “Let’s face it, if they were, it probably wouldn’t require the best of the very best to solve these complicated equations.”

Thompson’s journey to one of the nation’s most powerful health insurance executives started in farm country near Jewell, Iowa. His mother was a beautician and his father worked at a grain elevator while helping farmers around the harvest. Thompson’s conversational nature and ability to toggle between the complexities of health policy and talking about the Iowa Hawkeyes stemmed from his upbringing.

“I try not to draw too many distinctions between work and life, and maybe that’s growing up on a farm in Iowa ... I didn’t grow up in a setting where these things were separate,” Thompson said in the same video excerpt. “I’m pretty proud of that upbringing and certainly try to bring a lot of those life lessons to my own two boys. And they’re doing OK, because they’re big Hawkeye fans like me.”

Thompson graduated as valedictorian in 1993 from South Hamilton High School before attending the University of Iowa, where he met his wife, Paulette. He worked at the PwC accounting firm in Minneapolis before starting as a corporate development director at UnitedHealth in 2004 and moving quickly up the corporate ladder.

Thompson annually hosted golf fundraisers for the UnitedHealthcare Children’s Foundation and was named honorary co-chair of the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games. The Maple Grove resident was described as a “regular guy” and “dad in the bleachers” at his two sons’ sporting events. He relished going to Timberwolves basketball games last season with his oldest son before he left for college.

Why Thompson was apparently targeted for assassination is unclear. UnitedHealthcare is more familiar to the public as a provider of health insurance than its parent company, a health conglomerate led by CEO Andrew Witty. Mangione reportedly had severe back pain, fueling speculation that he had personal experience with health care coverage problems, but the company disclosed Thursday that he had not been insured by UnitedHealthcare.

Under Thompson’s leadership, operational earnings from UnitedHealthcare grew from $12 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2023 amid accusations that the company overused denials and prior authorization to limit its spending on medical care. A report by a U.S. Senate subcommittee last October faulted health insurers including UnitedHealthcare for denying prior authorization requests for expensive post-acute care at much higher rates than other requests.

UnitedHealthcare leads the market in the sale of Medicare Advantage plans, a privatized version of the government program for seniors that’s now a bigger source of coverage than original Medicare. Proponents and critics debate whether these plans save federal taxpayer money or use cracks in the government system to maximize profits. Colleagues said UnitedHealth’s presence in that market grew considerably under Thompson’s leadership.

Thompson was in charge when the insurer entered Minnesota’s Medicare Advantage market, at a time when the federal government was forcing other insurers to shut down popular “Medicare Cost” plans. The number of Minnesota seniors enrolling in UnitedHealthcare’s Advantage plans ballooned from 8,600 in 2019 to 100,000 this fall, according to an analysis of federal data. Some of its plans have achieved above-average or excellent federal ratings for quality.

“For us, if we’re going to participate in a marketplace, we’re going to do so in a meaningful way,” Thompson told the Star Tribune in 2018.

The insider trading lawsuit alleged Thompson made $15.1 million in proceeds on a Feb. 16 stock sale, just 11 days before a Justice Department investigation of UnitedHealth became public. Company stock plummeted in value after that announcement, though shares later surged above Thompson’s reported sale price.

The stock sank again amid the public uproar over health insurance following the Dec. 4 shooting. Witty sent a message to UnitedHealth workers Wednesday saying the company had endured a difficult week and “we owe it to Brian to make good on our promise to make health care work better for everybody.”

“We’re going to make sure medicines are filled, infusions are administered and people can navigate their therapies for the rarest states of disease,” he wrote. “We’ll be there for people who need screenings, who need scans, who need surgery.”