Which of These Updated Health-Care Plans Is Right for You?, The New Yorker — Shouts & Murmurs, November 26, 2025, by Eli Grober
Thrilling news: it’s time to decide what health-care plan you’ll be opting in to for the coming year. Given the feedback we’ve received about how limited and expensive health care has become in this country, we’ve made some updates to our available offerings. Please choose from the following options.
The Basic Plan
This is our most popular plan. It covers things like breathing (allowed, no co-pay), sleeping (hint: you must pretend to sleep in order to fall asleep), and eating (you pay for your own food). No other coverage is provided. This is an ideal choice if you are immune to all diseases, and are also immortal.
The Catastrophic Plan
If the San Andreas Fault opens up, we’ll send Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson to help. Not to help you, specifically—he’ll just generally lend a hand in California. Maybe he’ll leap from one building onto another building. Very cool stuff.
The Become-a-Doctor Plan
This plan costs sixty grand a year and includes a residency at a local hospital, where you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to eventually become the primary-care physician to yourself, and everyone you know. …
The “Looney Tunes” Plan
If a piano falls on your head, or you run off a cliff, because you thought that a painting was a road, you will be tended to by a cartoon rabbit in scrubs.
The Plan Within a Plan
You have to sign up for this plan to read what the actual plan is.
(more in the article)
Comment:
By Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
This week, befitting the Thanksgiving holiday, many blogs include “Gratitude” in the title. Us too. I’m truly grateful that the New Yorker put a smile on my face with this hilarious run-down of fantastically innovative health plans … that seem almost plausible alternatives to the crazily dysfunctional insurance we actually have.
Indeed the last “plan” listed above is largely true: we don’t really know what our insurance covers until we need it. There are far too many limited networks with fictitious provider lists, over-crowded clinical practices, uncovered services, incorrectly denied prior authorizations, and huge (often unmanageable) financial obligations for beneficiaries. Ouch – too much truth.
Let’s make this kind of parody archaic, with single payer. THAT will assure an enduring smile on my face – the economist’s dream of efficiency merged with quality. Indeed, it’s everyone’s dream of health care when you need it, without financial barriers. THAT will justify a truly grateful Thanksgiving, every day of the year, for all the years in our lives.
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