I've tried my best to dissect your indignant broadside to Eri, and I must admit I can't follow your logic. Your small town population analogy is a total non sequitur. If your figures are correct, then United Health profits went from 3.7% in 2008 to 4.4% in 2009. That's approximately a 4.4/3.7 = 19% increase in profits. In 2010 (or at least the first half of this year) profits jumped to 5%. If the same trend holds for the rest of this year, that is a jump of 5/4.4 =14% increase in profits in 2009-2010. I agree that approximately 5% profits for any business are not unfair, but double digit increases from year to year in a firm with this much financial mass is pretty good acceleration. You can bet that made it into their stockholders' report.

Those are phenomenal increases for a business making close to a 100 Gigabucks a year during a "recession economy". This is not a mom and pop outfit. And if this firm is representative of the industry, then the health insurance racket in the USA is doing just fine.

As for total income, there is a gross revenue jump of 7% for 2008-2009, and about the same for 2009-2010, if present trends hold out until the end of this year. So profits are increasing about twice as fast as revenue, again, assuming present trends hold steady through the end of this year. Not too shabby.

To put it another way, the absolute increase in gross profits (not as a percentage of revenue) in 2008-2009 is 28%. The same value for 2009-2010 is 21%. But these values are admittedly unfair since they don't take into account the extravagant corporate growth in that 2-year period. Yes, I agree that 70% figure is definitely a lie, but as far as I can tell, the only one who brought it up is you.