It's the third Monday of the month, in the middle of Minnesota.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the game 500.
Years ago when we played this, we always got prizes, but you know, you get to an age like
us and you've got enough stuff to get rid of in your house, much less.
So now we give cash.
Lou Paul and her friends are settling in for an afternoon of cards.
Nobody's playing for blood, we're all just playing for fun, aren't we?
Yes ma'am, if you say so ma'am.
The first prize gets three dollars.
My club was 55 years ago and playing with them ever since, but not the same people.
55 years this card club has been going at it.
The ones who are left keep each other going.
Lose the baby in the group at 81.
Her family believes her connection to her community, staying active and engaged, and
having the same doctor over 30 years, are as much the keys to her longevity as genetics.
A lot of people talk about small town community health.
It may not be the most advanced from a scientific perspective that you may get in a major university
hospital, but there is something about that local relationship and that local set of caring
individuals that I think really makes a difference in people's lives.
My doctor, when I went in for my last physical, we were talking and he was very nice to sit
and talk with, and I was talking about my mother dying at 97 and he says, you know what,
I think you're going to beat your mother, so I don't think so.
But you didn't think you'd get here either.
She finds herself like many women in America years after the kids are gone, still a primary
care provider in her family.
Now it's for just herself and her husband, Norm.
I take care of him very well, I think, and I enjoy doing it.
I'm not complaining about it at all, but I have to do a lot.
One, two, three, four.
She double and triple counts the pills that help keep her and her husband going.
Well, he's got 13 pills in the morning and six at night.
He counts them, like I say, every morning, so make sure that I didn't goof up in one.
He lets me know if I do, so he won't take it tonight.
On a walk recently with her son, Tom, she was talking about the first time they had
insurance as a family, how she helped get her parents signed up for a new thing they
called Medicare.
And much as she helped her parents in later life, her children now help her.
I went to school to become a pharmacist, so I have the medical background and worked
as a pharmacist for maybe 10 years.
So I often am the resource for what does this drug do, are there alternatives?
Tom knows that as people age in this country, not only do they develop chronic disease,
but the longer they live, the more chronic conditions they have to manage.
He's seen it with his mother and his father, the diligence they have to pay managing care.
Tom also sees this now on more of a national scale.
For 20 years, he's been working at UnitedHealthcare as a pharmacist and a chief of operations.
He became CEO of United's Medicare and Retirement Division, and today he's stepping into the
role of chief consumer officer at UnitedHealthcare, one of the largest health insurance companies
in the world.
He says his mission here is personal.
How I've encouraged people to look at it and how I look at it myself is to imagine that
when you're interfacing with someone you may not know, it's likely that your aunt,
uncle, parent are dealing with the exact same issue, and it helps to put a personal face
on it.
It helps to make it real and personal so that you're dealing with one individual, not thousands
or millions of individuals at a time.
At UnitedHealthcare, he's gone so far as to start circulating frames for the employees
to hold those photos.
It's about being connected to the why of what they're doing.
If I have that picture on my desk and I'm dealing with someone who I don't even know,
I can understand what they're going through, and I can understand how important that relationship
is, and it makes a world of difference.
UnitedHealthcare processes tens of billions of transactions every year, but Tom Paul will
tell you every one of them has to start with a personal connection to the person at the
other end of the line.
It's because it's about a person's health.
It's about a person's life, and it's a different process than selling something in a box on
a shelf.
He applies the same personal approach to helping his mother and UnitedHealthcare's customers
wade through all the information that's out there on healthcare and Medicare in particular.
We have a fortunate relationship, in fact, that she has a direct line into the company
who provides her health insurance.
Many people don't have that.
It's really my job in the most basic sort of way to gain the trust of the consumers
that we serve on a day-to-day basis and then be able to help them work through each of
these issues, be a guide to them so that as they're dealing with issues, we're no longer
what they may perceive as the roadblock, but we're now actually the trusted advisor.
Tom and his colleagues here know a lot about how healthcare works.
With so many transactions taking place every year, they know which types of care and treatment
options have been most effective.
They're using vast amounts of data to help improve the quality of care.
Will be my job to personalize that and make it about a one-on-one interaction.
It will be our job as an organization to make sure that we take the leverage and the scale
that we bring, the efficiency that we bring, and the science that we bring so that when
someone does want to make a personal decision, we'll bring all those resources to bear to
help that one individual.
We've got to go back home to our house and do everything over because I forgot to put
my earrings in today.
At UnitedHealthcare, they're working to help all customers, as if they were family.
Every transaction, personal.
