The Day I Put My Phone Face-Down and Couldn’t Leave It There
I want you to know I tried to write about peaches this week.
I had the whole thing planned. I was at my usual corner table — the one by the window where the afternoon light does that thing I love — with my iced coffee sweating a little ring onto my napkin and my summer scarf (yes, summer scarf, we’ve been over this) folded over the back of my chair. I had four hundred words about my aunt’s peach preserves and the way a warm kitchen in July smells like being loved.
Then my phone buzzed.
Two headlines, stacked right on top of each other, like the universe was doing a bit. Bernie Sanders, pushing Medicare for All again. And directly underneath it: UnitedHealth just made $5.48 billion. In one quarter. Three months. Ninety-some days.
I put the phone face-down on the table. That’s my rule. That’s my whole brand, honestly — the comfort scroll, the soft exit, small joys are big deals. I picked my pen back up. Peaches, Heather. Peaches.
I could not write about peaches.
Because here’s what I did instead, and I’m a little embarrassed to tell you: I made a list on the back of a receipt, which is a very me thing to do, except this list wasn’t groceries. This list was math. $5.48 billion in profit. A 61% jump from the same quarter last year. $112 billion in revenue — with a B — in three months, from one company. And they were so pleased with themselves that they raised their profit forecast for the rest of the year.
And then I found the part that made me set my coffee down.
There’s a number they report called the medical care ratio. It’s the share of your premium money that actually gets spent on your medical care. Theirs dropped to 86.7%, from 89.4% a year ago — driven by “benefit design and pricing discipline” — and Wall Street celebrated. That’s the good news, in their world. The good news is that less of your money went to your care. Forbes
Read that again while your coffee’s still warm. The line went the direction investors like because it went the direction sick people don’t.
And how did they manage it? Partly by pulling out of markets where they sold coverage under the ACA and dropping out of counties where they sold Medicare Advantage plans — the unprofitable ones. Which is a tidy corporate word for the ones where people needed too much care. They served about 525,000 fewer members than the quarter before. Half a million people, off the rolls, and the number gets read aloud on an earnings call like it’s a spring cleaning win.
I write about kindness for a living. I write about checking on your neighbors and bringing a casserole when somebody’s sick, because I believe — I really, truly believe — that taking care of each other is the most ordinary, most human thing we do. It’s the coziest thing there is. It’s the whole point.
So somebody explain to me how “can we afford to take care of each other” is still a question, when one insurer — one — can skim five and a half billion dollars of profit off the top of our sickness in a single quarter. That money didn’t come from nowhere. It came from premiums and copays and denied claims and the eight hundred dollars somebody’s grandmother is choosing between this month. It came out of us, blood from a stone, and the stone is your chest x-ray.
They tell us Medicare for All is too expensive. Fine. Show me the ledger. Because from where I’m sitting — corner table, window light, iced coffee going watery — it looks like we’re already paying for universal healthcare. We’re paying for it every single month. We’re just not getting it. The money takes a detour through Minnetonka first, and the detour costs billions, and the detour is the product.
And apparently I’ve had company in my little corner-table fury, because a national survey found 65% of likely voters support a single-payer plan that would replace private insurance — even after being told they’d pay higher taxes. Sixty-five percent. That’s most of us. That’s your church potluck, your bowling league, your group chat. We already agree. We’re just being told we don’t.
I know this isn’t my lane. I know you come here for scarves and mugs and the good kind of Tuesday. And I promise the peaches are coming — my aunt would never forgive me otherwise.
But bringing a casserole to a sick neighbor is the most beloved thing I know how to write about, and Medicare for All is just that, scaled up to a country. It’s the casserole, with a payroll line. Caring for the sick without bankrupting them is the single coziest thing a nation can do. Anyone telling you it’s radical is probably holding an earnings report.
Small joys are big deals. Big cruelties are, too. Stay kind, stay caffeinated — and stay mad about this one, just a little, even after your coffee’s gone.
