Filmmaker Michael Moore, who was named in a manifesto found in the backpack of accused killer Luigi Mangione, has declared that he wants to “pour gasoline” on American anger against the health insurance industry.

The director of such documentaries as Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko wrote that media outlets repeatedly asked whether he wanted to condemn murder after his work was cited by Mangione, the 26-year-old who has been charged with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson on a New York street.

In a post on the subscription-based platform Substack, Moore wrote that there had been an immediate outpouring of anger toward the health insurance industry after Thompson’s death.

“Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger,” he wrote. “I am not one of them.

“The anger is 1000 per cent justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger.”

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Mangione’s manifesto referred to how Moore was one of those who exposed “corruption and greed” in America’s for-profit healthcare industry.

In Sicko, his 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary, Moore unfavourably compared the American healthcare and pharmaceutical industries with universal healthcare in Canada, the UK and Cuba.

Moore posted that there were “a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of denying health care vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country ...