SAN FRANCISCO — Alignment Healthcare is looking a bit lonely at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. CEO John Kao doesn’t really mind.
All of the major publicly traded health insurers either declined to appear at this year’s event, expressed no interest in attending, or backed out after last month’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. That has left Alignment, which only sells Medicare Advantage plans and has roughly $3 billion of annual revenue, as the largest insurer making a formal presentation at JPM.
Other than Alignment, only one other insurer — Clover Health, another Medicare Advantage company that is only half the size of Alignment — is here. Kao didn’t retreat from the conference amid the public backlash against health insurers in the wake of Thompson’s death because he understood where the public’s anger originated.
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