Loneliness Is Making Us Sick. Here's the Bill.
Loneliness Is Making Us Sick. Here's the Bill.
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic February 2, 2026
Created: February 24, 2026
I have the best health insurance I've ever had in my life.
I say this without irony. The plan is comprehensive. The coverage is generous. The benefits package is, on paper, exactly what you'd want.
So when I sat down one afternoon and actually looked at what my plan covered for mental healthcare, I expected to feel good about it. In-network providers covered at seventy-five percent. That sounds excellent. I called a few of them.
Not accepting new patients. Not accepting new patients. The information on the website is outdated — we haven't been in-network for two years.
Out-of-network coverage drops to twenty-five percent. Which means for every two-hundred-dollar therapy session — if I could even get one — I'm paying a hundred and fifty dollars out of pocket. For the privilege of sitting with someone who can help me understand why I'm lonely, but who has no mechanism whatsoever for introducing me to anyone who might become a friend.
My plan also gave me free access to a meditation app. I used it. It helped me fall asleep. That's genuinely useful, and I mean that. But as a response to the Surgeon General of the United States declaring loneliness a national public health crisis — as the healthcare system's answer to an epidemic affecting the majority of Americans — a meditation app and a list of therapists who aren't taking new patients is not a solution.
That afternoon, staring at my benefits statement, was the moment the third vertical crystallized.
This Is a Medical Emergency. We're Treating It Like a Mood.
Here is the sentence I want you to sit with for a moment:
Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by 26%. Social isolation increases that risk to 29%.
Those aren't figures from a wellness blog. They're from the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory, synthesized across 148 independent studies involving more than 300,000 participants, with an average follow-up of seven and a half years. This is among the most rigorously documented findings in modern public health research.
The Surgeon General compared the mortality risk of chronic loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Not as a rhetorical flourish — as a data-supported equivalency. Lacking social connection carries a higher mortality risk than obesity. Higher than physical inactivity. Higher than air pollution. We have decades of public policy, enormous public health budgets, and entire federal agencies organized around fighting smoking and obesity. The response to loneliness, in most health plans, is a meditation app.
58% of Americans report feeling lonely, according to Cigna's 2025 data. Three in five Americans, per the Surgeon General. And the trend is moving in the wrong direction — that number was 54% in 2023 and has climbed every year since. This is not a stable condition the healthcare system can wait out. It's an accelerating crisis.
What Loneliness Actually Does to Your Body
This is the part that changed how I understood the problem I was building a company to solve. I went into this research knowing loneliness felt bad. I came out of it understanding that loneliness is physically destroying people — and that the healthcare system is paying the bill.
The heart. The research on loneliness and cardiovascular disease is among the most robust in the literature. Loneliness carries a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke. Among socially isolated adults, the risk of recurrent stroke, heart attack, or cardiovascular mortality rises 40%. For patients with heart failure specifically — a population health plans know well and monitor closely — loneliness produces a 68% increased risk of hospitalization and a 57% higher rate of emergency department visits. Those are not marginal numbers. Those are the numbers that drive the most expensive line items in a health plan's claims data.
The brain. Chronically lonely individuals carry a 50% increased risk of developing dementia. For older adults, who are already among the highest-cost and highest-need populations for any health plan, this is staggering. One in three adults over 45 is lonely. Ten thousand Americans turn 65 every single day. The intersection of an aging population and an accelerating loneliness epidemic is not a future problem — it is the current claims environment that every large health plan is already trying to manage.
Mental health. Loneliness is a primary driver of clinical depression and anxiety. Chronically lonely individuals carry a 64% increased risk of clinical depression and a 3× higher risk of anxiety disorders. These are not downstream consequences of other conditions — they're direct effects of social isolation, and they generate their own cascade of healthcare utilization: therapy visits, psychiatric care, medication, emergency mental health interventions, and hospitalizations.
The immune system. Less discussed but equally important: loneliness compromises immune function, elevates inflammation markers, and slows wound healing. The chronically lonely are sicker more often, recover more slowly, and are more vulnerable to the chronic conditions — diabetes, respiratory disease, autoimmune disorders — that drive the highest sustained healthcare costs.
What Health Plans Are Actually Paying
The financial picture is precise enough to be damning.
Lonely individuals generate 32% higher healthcare costs than socially connected people. Not marginally higher — a third more. For a health plan with 500,000 members, roughly 30% of whom are experiencing significant loneliness, that excess cost runs to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The aggregate annual cost to the U.S. healthcare system from loneliness-related conditions is estimated at $406 billion. Among older adults alone, social isolation generates an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending every year — primarily from increased hospitalizations, longer stays, more nursing facility care, and higher readmission rates.
55% greater risk of hospital readmission among poorly connected patients. That one number alone should focus every population health director in the country. Readmission rates are one of the most watched metrics in modern healthcare management. Payers and providers have invested billions in care coordination, discharge planning, and post-acute support to reduce them. And here is one of the most powerful predictors of readmission sitting largely unaddressed in the benefits catalog: the patient goes home alone, has no one checking on them, and ends up back in the ED within thirty days.
The lonely patient costs more across every category — more PCP visits for non-specific complaints that are really expressions of isolation, more ER visits that could have been avoided with a support system, more prescriptions, longer hospital stays, slower recoveries. And they're less likely to adhere to their medications, because medication adherence is a social behavior — people with support systems take their pills, keep their appointments, and follow their care plans in ways that isolated patients simply don't.
Loneliness Is Not a Mood. It's a Social Determinant of Health.
The Surgeon General's framing matters here, because it changes what the appropriate institutional response looks like.
Health plans have increasingly organized themselves around social determinants of health — the upstream conditions that drive downstream clinical outcomes. Food insecurity. Housing instability. Transportation barriers. These are now recognized across the industry as legitimate targets for healthcare intervention, because addressing them reduces utilization and improves outcomes more efficiently than treating the conditions they generate.
Loneliness belongs on that list. The evidence base is as strong as anything else classified as a social determinant. The causal pathways to clinical disease are documented. The cost implications are quantified. And yet most health plans' response remains: a meditation app and a therapy benefit that most members can't actually access.
The gap between what we know about loneliness and what we're doing about it is one of the most consequential mismatches in American healthcare right now.
What the Current System Misses
I want to be clear: I'm not arguing that therapy is bad or that mental health benefits don't matter. They do. The problem isn't the existence of mental health coverage — it's what mental health coverage is designed to do.
Therapy is designed to help you understand and process your experience. A skilled therapist can help a lonely person understand the roots of their isolation, develop insight into their patterns, and build coping strategies. That's genuinely valuable. But a therapist cannot introduce you to someone who might become your friend. That is not what therapy does. It addresses the symptom — the suffering — without addressing the cause: the actual absence of meaningful human connection.
The meditation app works even further upstream from the problem. Managing stress and improving sleep are good things. They are not friendship. They are not connection. They do not reduce the 29% cardiovascular risk or the 50% dementia risk or the 32% higher healthcare costs. They make the patient feel slightly calmer about being alone.
What's missing from every standard benefits package is a tool designed to do the one thing that actually resolves loneliness: help people find each other. Not process their loneliness. Not cope with it. Resolve it — by facilitating the authentic human connections that the research consistently shows are the intervention that works.
What Kenektic for Health Plans Is
The idea is straightforward even if the execution is not: health plans offer Kenektic as a covered benefit, the same way they offer telehealth or mental health apps. Members get access to kAI, who gets to know them through natural conversation, understands who they are and what kind of connections they're looking for, and introduces them to other members who are genuinely compatible.
Not a directory. Not a forum. Not a random match. A thoughtful, personality-informed introduction from an AI that has learned enough about both people to say — specifically, with context — here's why I think you two would actually get along.
For the health plan, the ROI case is concrete. A regional plan with 100,000 members investing in Kenektic at modest per-member rates can expect, based on the utilization data, savings that significantly exceed the investment through reduced emergency visits, lower readmission rates, better medication adherence, and reduced mental health crisis interventions. For large plans with millions of members, the math becomes extraordinary — the excess cost of loneliness is so large that even modest reductions in healthcare utilization among engaged members generate returns that dwarf the program cost.
For the member — the actual person living with loneliness while their plan pays increasingly enormous bills to treat the conditions it generates — the benefit is the one the healthcare system has never offered before. Not another way to process being alone. An actual friend.
The Three Verticals, Completed
If you've read Posts 14 and 15 alongside this one, you've now seen the full picture of why Kenektic is built the way it is.
Universities are losing a third of their freshman class every year to students who never found their people — at a cost of $50,000 to $200,000 in lost tuition per dropout. Sixty to seventy-three percent of college students are significantly lonely, the counseling centers are overwhelmed with six to twelve week wait times, and every existing solution reaches a fraction of the students who need it.
Workplaces are absorbing $154 billion annually in loneliness-driven absenteeism, while 80% of employees — four out of five people showing up every day — don't have a single work best friend. The productivity loss, the turnover costs of $15,000 to $25,000 per departing employee, and the disengagement that Gallup prices at $7.8 trillion globally are all downstream of the same unaddressed problem.
Health plans are paying $406 billion a year for the medical consequences of a condition they've largely declined to treat — offering meditation apps while lonely members generate 32% higher claims, fill emergency departments with preventable visits, and get readmitted to hospitals at rates 55% higher than connected patients.
Three different institutions. Three very different missions, buyer types, and ROI calculations. One underlying cause.
The Surgeon General called loneliness "as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day" and declared it a public health emergency in 2023. He asked every sector of American life to treat it accordingly — individuals and families, schools and workplaces, healthcare systems and technology companies.
I built Kenektic because I've lived this problem from seventh grade through adulthood, through Oregon and USC and work and the conference circuit and a lifetime of being surrounded by people and feeling invisible inside all of it. I know what it costs personally. Now I know what it costs institutionally.
The answer isn't a meditation app.
It's an introduction.
If you work in student affairs, HR, or healthcare leadership: This is exactly what it looks like. If you're seeing this problem in your institution — the dropout rates, the disengagement, the claims data — and you want to talk about what Kenektic could do for your population I would love to hear from you.
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "The Day the PhD Got Smarter" — I ran the same code review two days in a row. February 4th on Opus 4.5, February 5th on Opus 4.6. I didn't change a single line of code between them. The difference in what came back wasn't incremental. It wasn't a refinement. It was the kind of gap that makes you sit back and rethink what you thought you understood about how fast this is all moving.