US healthcare investment conference faces Palestine protests

A healthcare investment conference in San Francisco one month after the murder of a CEO in New York that unleashed nationwide rage over for-profit healthcare was met by dozens of protesters Monday afternoon.

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In front of the Westin St. Francis Hotel in the heart of the city’s downtown, demonstrators, led by labour union organisers and pro-Palestinian activists, stood on both sides of Powell Street while holding signs and chanting as executives were dropped off by guarded black SUVs.

“We believe as working people that everyone has the right to healthcare. Healthcare is a human right,” said Steve Zeltzer, a labour journalist, as the first in a series of speakers stationed directly across the street from the hotel entrance, which was heavily fortified by metal barricades and shoulder-to-shoulder police officers.

“The reason in this country that we don’t have healthcare is because of these people. These billionaires, United Healthcare, J.P. Morgan, these people are rapacious. All they care about is how to make more money by denying healthcare,” he said.

“The main reason we don’t have healthcare is because these billionaires don’t want us to have healthcare unless they can make a profit from it,” he said, as protesters continued to gather. He added that in addition to healthcare, J.P. Morgan is also investing in bombs, referring to its long-criticised financing of cluster bombs.

The four-day conference held by J.P. Morgan, is considered one of the largest of its kind in the world with 14,000 worldwide participants, 8,000 investors and 550 global healthcare companies, according to the event’s website. 

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A mobile electronic billboard near the hotel used to promote the conference described the gathering as “The premier investor conference” and stated that more than 350 companies were presenting, and more than 1,200 were attending, representing a collective capital of over $400 billion.

It was a bold showing of the increasingly corporatised global healthcare industry amid a growing resistance against the sector, ranging from nearly daily demonstrations to online testimonies by people sharing their personal stories of their healthcare coverage that has been denied or exorbitantly priced.

Americans pay more per capita for healthcare than any other country in the world, with more than 37 citizens living without insurance and an additional 41 million having inadequate access to healthcare, according to The Lancet medical journal. 

It is not uncommon for Americans to pay $1,000 per month in private health insurance premiums (without doctors’ visits), or for patients to get charged tens of thousands of dollars for emergency room visits. The most common reason for bankruptcy in the US is healthcare bills. 

The long-time simmering public anger reached a boiling point last month after the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, who was on his way to a shareholders’ conference. 

It was soon reported that he had been under investigation by the Department of Justice for insider trading, that his company had used artificial intelligence incorrectly to assess their denials of patient claims, and that UnitedHealthcare had the highest rate of claim denials of any other US healthcare company.

The suspect, Luigi Mangione, quickly became something of a folk hero, with the words “Free Luigi” repeatedly written in comments and spray-painted on walls across the country. 

Countless songs have been made in tribute to a murder suspect, who appears to have garnered far more public sympathy than a murdered CEO, showing Americans’ growing intolerance of an increasingly expensive and complex healthcare system. On Monday afternoon, multiple musicians played their own healthcare songs.

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Also at Monday afternoon’s demonstration, a number of protesters blamed Americans’ lack of affordable healthcare on US taxpayers’ money going towards Israel and other military commitments overseas. In fact, many of the same people have also been staging demonstrations in support of Palestinian healthcare workers affected by Israel’s war on Gaza.

One of the main speakers at Monday’s demonstration was Elizabeth Milos, a Spanish/English medical interpreter with the University of California, San Francisco, who supports Palestinians through her labour union.

“It’s amazing that we’re giving billions and billions of dollars to Israel, which happens to have universal healthcare on our dime, while we have here people dying in the streets,” she said. 

“I, as a Chilean American who have been fighting against fascism all my life, find it completely disgusting that Palestinians and people who support Palestinians are being accused of antisemitism,” she said, referring to resistance to American medical professionals protesting the conditions of their counterparts in Gaza, including from the group Canary Mission.

“This healthcare investment conference is made up of people, profiteers, who support the genocide of Gaza,” she said.

On the other side of the street, in front of the entrance to the hotel, protesters stood along the curb as they chanted at the attendees, at times making reference to US funding for Israel as a reason for Americans’ lack of healthcare. 

A man in a suit, standing where conference attendees were gathered, behind the police barricade, yelled to the protesters that he wanted a genocide against them. As he was repeatedly yelling at the protesters, another man in a suit wearing a J.P. Morgan lanyard pulled him aside to calm him down.

As the evening wore on, some of the attendees walked over to the areas where the protesters were gathered, and journalists who had been inside covering the conference went outside to speak with the demonstrators. Activists were already planning for the second day of the conference, which will feature as a guest speaker First Lady Jill Biden.