Blue Cross of Idaho removes ‘company leadership’ page, details about CEO from website
A screenshot shows an error page where the “company leadership” section of Blue Cross of Idaho’s website used to appear. Angela Palermo
The largest health insurer in Idaho has removed information about its corporate leadership from its website.
Blue Cross of Idaho appears to have quietly taken down the section of its page that lists the names, photos and biographical details of its executive team, including its president and CEO Paul Zurlo, following the fatal shooting of the CEO of another health insurance company Wednesday in New York.
Some of the details still appear in a Google search, such as the link to the leadership page and links to biographies about each of the executives. But when the links are clicked, the company’s website returns a error code that says “Oops! We can’t find that page,” and “Sorry, the page you’re looking for has been moved or no longer exists.”
It’s unclear if the leadership page will ever return. A spokesperson for Blue Cross of Idaho declined to comment Friday.
The corporate leadership page for Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, one of the largest health insurers in the country, has also disappeared from its website, Newsweek reported Friday. Healthcare Dive reported shortly afterward that UnitedHealthcare, Elevance, Centene, CVS and others have scrubbed images of their executives online, too.
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan, which police called a “brazen, targeted attack,” according to The Associated Press, has captivated social media this week and cast a harsh spotlight on the industry.
Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also faced swift backlash after it announced a decision to no longer pay for anesthesia care in certain states if the surgery or procedure goes past a certain time limit, a decision it reversed after anesthesiologists, lawmakers and the public broadly called on the company to do so immediately, NPR reported. Still, the announcement unlocked a wave of fury about the American health care system on social media, with users posting the names and photos of various health care CEOs.