SAN FRANCISCO — On the first day of the J.P Morgan Healthcare Conference, a small crowd of demonstrators gathered on a corner of Union Square just opposite of the conference’s main venue, the Westin St. Francis hotel.
It was a varied crew — musicians, health care workers, teachers, and others. Steve Zeltzer, a labor journalist and organizer, spoke before the group and held a sign saying, “No more Deny, Delay, Depose,” alluding to words inscribed on the bullet casings found when former UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed last month in New York City.
While most at the demonstration played music or chanted slogans, one protester crossed the street and bellowed slogans and expletives at JPM attendees coming in and out of the conference. Spit from his mouth glittered in the brisk Northern California air. He remained behind a small barricade in front of the hotel entrance, and attendees and conference security watched him with surprise and curiosity.
JPM is one of the largest health care conferences in the world and is known as a summit where key health and pharma deals, investments, and announcements are made. For the most part, that remained the case this year, but reminders of the killing of Brian Thompson were everywhere — from the demonstration outside the Westin on Monday to small security details trailing health care executives at every step. According to a source familiar with JPM’s new security protocols, the San Francisco Police Department assigned a dedicated police detail to the conference areas, and JPM increased private security personnel on site this year.
“Most of the CEOs here today have had to modify their life because of what happened in New York,” Terry Shaw, the retiring CEO of the nonprofit health system AdventHealth, told STAT. “You don’t drive home the same way every day. When you go someplace, you didn’t used to have security, and you do now.”
Several major, publicly traded health insurance companies and other health care companies also pulled out of attending the JPM conference this year as well, including Cigna, Humana, and CVS Health. The absence of these large companies had a depressing effect for companies that may be hoping to get commercial coverage for products, said Stephen Hahn, CEO-partner of Flagship Pioneering and a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner.
“They’re a big component of the ecosystem. I’ve heard lots of people talk about this, and it’s notable. For folks who are on the commercial pathway right now, it’s a big deal,” Hahn said. “It’s sad for me that that’s occurred, and the reason it’s occurred.”
JPM would otherwise provide a chance for such companies to show how their products, whether medical devices or new medicines, can be good for patient care and the health system. “It’s an opportunity to showcase how you can align good care and good stewardship of health care resources and dollars,” he said.
But by and large, attendees told STAT that they didn’t feel personally targeted by the demonstrators or the general American public that had expressed anger and outrage toward the health care industry following the Thompson shooting. Demonstrators like Zeltzer also said they hadn’t come to Union Square to promote violence, but rather hoped to send a broad message to the health care industry that they felt the system in the United States is broken.
“I don’t condone what Luigi did,” Zeltzer said, referring to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing Thompson. “Killing a CEO will not change the health care system in this country. It’s an expression of the anger and frustration people have,” he told STAT. “It’s not one company, not one hedge fund, not one bank. The whole industry is based on profit. That’s what we’re saying is the problem.”
Attendees said all the additional security around the conference sparked discussions about inequity, access, and cost in the American health care system and the frustration of the American public towards health care. Many said that they were sympathetic to the messages that the demonstrators outside the Westin hoped to send.
“From my perspective in small biotech, we’re trying to develop new cancer therapies. We have an amazing team that dedicates their lives to trying to create real breakthroughs — for patients,” said David Earp, the CEO of Circle Pharma, a biotech focused on developing a new technology for treating cancer and other illnesses.
“I don’t want to be dismissive about what’s happening in the broader context,” Earp added. “There certainly are inefficiencies in the system. The more we examine the causes of that, the more opportunities we have to fix it. I think everybody should welcome discussion about why this is challenging.”
Dan Morissette, the CFO of CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic-based nonprofit network of 140 hospitals, told STAT that he believed the system needs to gain more trust from the public. “This is a complex health system that we have and includes pharma companies, payers, providers, device makers,” he said. “We would all like to have things better and more efficient in general.”
Shaw from AdventHealth, which has annual revenue of $21 billion, said that he believed the public frustration voiced after Thompson’s killing might be better redirected.
“People that can’t get the care that they want with the health care plan that they have are very frustrated,” Shaw said. “That really has almost nothing to do with me. Your employer is the one that provides your health care insurance.”
But when STAT noted that hospitals charge the prices that insurers ultimately pay and pass along to consumers, Shaw said his system negotiates for commercial rates and has to take what Medicare and Medicaid offer. “You can either have good insurance or bad insurance, and if you have bad insurance, I can understand how you’d be frustrated in today’s environment,” Shaw said.
The addition of armed security and police reminded many attendees of another environment in the United States — the ease of access to firearms and gun violence in this country, some attendees told STAT. Seeing weapons on the hips of law enforcement personnel is always “unsettling,” said Edwin Stone, the CEO of Cellular Origins, a small biotech company, and who is from the United Kingdom.
Stone, interviewed on Thursday in the waning hours of the conference, said that inside the hotel, past the security checks and beyond the discussions of health care outrage, the conference hummed along with its “usual, wonderful chaos.” Billion-dollar deals were made, investments were announced, and word of new medicines and science created buzz. Many in the industry seemed to be optimistic about the biotech market finally lifting in 2025 after a low period of many years, creating, at times, a tentative sense of excitement.