Employee's Way of 'Breaking' Boss With Emails Leaves Internet Thrilled
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
A post detailing one employee's subtle act of workplace defiance has resonated with thousands on Reddit, offering a glimpse into how workers are reclaiming emotional boundaries amid toxic leadership.
The post was shared by Reddit user u/maybebats*** in the r/pettyrevenge subreddit. The post has received more than 30,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments since it was shared on June 3.
"My mom died last month, and my boss was a real dick about the whole situation," the poster wrote. "He's always been hard to work for, but he actually told me to get over it because her death was creating extra work for him. That was the straw and this camel's back broke. I can't quit my job, but I'm taking steps to move to a better role and I know I need to keep the peace until then."
Rather than confronting the boss directly, the Reddit user chose a quieter form of protest—removing all exclamation marks from emails addressed to their supervisor. "I always start emails with a positive first sentence. Something like a simple 'Good morning!' or 'I hope you're having a nice day!' I still do this on emails to my boss, but I have omitted exclamation points entirely," they wrote.
The poster said: "I've been here over a decade so it's extremely noticeable to anyone who works with me closely and it's driving him crazy. His messages seem frazzled and he's frantically using exclamation points in every email, something he has never done before. It's so stupid but I can tell it's breaking him."
Thirty-one percent of American workers were reported to have a boss who has "exhibited toxic behavior," while 71 percent said they have had at least one "toxic boss" during their career, according to a September 2023 survey published by The Harris Poll.
Stock image: A woman types on a laptop computer at a desk in an office setting.
Stock image: A woman types on a laptop computer at a desk in an office setting.
Getty
'It's Self-Preservation'
Experts say the viral post underscores a broader reckoning with how grief and emotional labor are treated in professional settings.
Dana Mahina, a leadership coach and founder of Bloom Women's Group Coaching, told Newsweek: "This story perfectly illustrates why so many people are burned out and disengaged at work. When leaders treat employees as productivity machines rather than whole humans, they create environments where people do the bare minimum—professionally and emotionally."
Mahina described the Reddit poster's move not as petty, but strategic. "The employee's quiet rebellion isn't petty—it's self-preservation. And honestly? It's working. Sometimes, the most-powerful response to toxic behavior is to simply stop feeding it with your energy," she said.
Mahina added that such actions are a method of boundary-setting, especially when direct confrontation or quitting is not an option. Mahina noted that the boss's reaction validates the poster's instincts. "The brilliance of this approach? It's completely professional while being quietly subversive. The employee is still doing their job, still being polite, but they've withdrawn their emotional labor—and it's driving their boss crazy because he can sense something has shifted."
'A Risky Strategy'
However, Veronica Lichtenstein, a licensed mental health counselor, told Newsweek that this approach comes with risks.
Lichtenstein said: "While this tactic might feel satisfying in the short term, it's a risky strategy for someone who still wants a promotion or to maintain professionalism. Emails are permanent records, and passive aggression—even in punctuation—can backfire."
Lichtenstein added that the gesture, while minor, could alter perceptions in the workplace. "If the boss notices the shift and perceives it as hostility, it could reinforce a negative dynamic—exactly what the employee wants to avoid while job searching. Worse, it might inadvertently paint the employee as the problem in conflicts, rather than the boss whose dismissive behavior started the tension."
Still, Lichtenstein acknowledged the root issue wasn't punctuation. "Exclamation points aren't the real issue here. The deeper problem is a toxic work environment where an employee feels compelled to weaponize tone because their boss lacks basic empathy."
Mahina added: "This employee experienced one of life's most devastating losses, and their boss essentially told them their grief was inconvenient. That's not just poor leadership—that's dehumanizing."
'Good Petty Revenge'
The post struck a chord with many Reddit users who applauded the subtle defiance.
"This is such a good petty revenge. He can't legitimately complain because you aren't doing anything wrong, but it is driving him nuts. I love it!" wrote u/Ill_Industry6452.
Another user, u/the_greek_italian, commented: "I love how this small thing is so noticeable that it's literally making him stressed via computer."
"Keep it up. You are doing exactly what he deserves," noted U/Wanderstern, while u/busyshrew posted: "OMG [oh my God] I laughed too hard at this … I like your style."
U/ZanteTheInfernal added: "Next time he wants you to do something email him back with a lowercase 'sure' no punctuation."
Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via the Reddit messaging system.
Do you have a similar story or dilemma to share? Let us know via life@newsweek.com. We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.
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On a special episode (first released on July 24th) of The Excerpt podcast: The question is: Why do we struggle to sleep? Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic, joins The Excerpt to talk about insomnia and what we can do about solving our sleep issues. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Taylor Wilson: Hello, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is a special episode of the Excerpt. According to a report released by the American Medical Association earlier this year, one-third of American adults experience acute insomnia, an inability to fall or stay asleep for several days at a time, but one in 10 adults suffer from chronic insomnia. That's an inability to fall or stay asleep three nights a week for three months or more. The condition has potentially debilitating health impacts, including an increased risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even car accidents. So the question is, why can't we sleep? Here to help me dig into the issue is Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently went on her own journey to solve her insomnia and who shared her story in the magazine. Thank you for joining me, Jennifer. Jennifer Senior: Thanks for having me. Taylor Wilson: So let's start with I guess a 30,000-foot view of the issue. I know you spoke with a lot of sleep specialists, did a lot of independent research for your piece. Jennifer, what's the big picture here on American's trouble with sleep? Jennifer Senior: Right. Yeah. What's funny, I think the story was a little misnamed. I mean, this is really more story about, well, if you can't sleep, don't feel awful about it because there are so many shaming stories about people, whatever solutions people seek out. I do talk in the beginning about the way that the modern world absolutely conspires against sleep, that it just lays waste to your circadian rhythms. That people work two jobs, 16.4% of us work non-standard hours. If you're a white collar kind of professional, you've got these woodpecker like peck, peck, peck, incursions into your life all night and weekend long from your boss's work sort of never ends. I mean, we're just no longer yoked to the rhythms of the earth anymore. We're just part of this whirl of a wired world. Taylor Wilson: In the course of doing your research, was there something in particular that surprised you most about the problem? Jennifer Senior: I'll tell you what surprised me most, just generally. Whenever I interviewed any expert about this, and it didn't matter what species of expert, they could be an epidemiologist, they could be a neurologist, they could be a psychiatrist, they could be a clinician. Most of them said the same thing. There is a slight misconception that you need eight hours of sleep. There is some data saying this. There is another equally robust data set saying 6.5 to 7.4 is associated with the best health outcomes. Now it's very hard to tell. These studies are observational. They're not randomized. There was all sorts of confounds and problems with this, but this one study in particular had a million people in it. It's been replicated. There are plenty of people who believe this data and people vary. And over the course of a lifetime, your individual sleep capacity could change. In a funny way, that was what surprised me most. Right? This mantra, which is kind of a tyranny, get eight hours or else. 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So I mean, those are additional examples I suppose. Taylor Wilson: Let's talk through your story a bit here. When did you first realize that you had an issue with sleep? And walk us through your experience with insomnia. Jennifer Senior: It was 25 years ago and it was a very mysterious onset. I cannot tell you what brought it on to this day. It is a mystery. I had this extremely well-regulated kind of circadian clock. I fell asleep every night at 1:00. I woke up every day at 9:00. I lost my alarm clock. I still woke up at those times. I didn't have to buy a new alarm clock until I had an early flight one day, and yet sometime very close to my 29th birthday when virtually no circumstances in my life had changed one iota, I had a bad night, fell asleep at like 5:00. Thought nothing of it until they became more regular, and then I started doing all-nighters involuntarily, and I felt like I'd been poisoned. And to this day, I don't know what happened, but once that happens, the whole cycle starts to happen, then people suddenly become very afraid of not falling asleep and whatever kicked it off whether it's mysterious or known becomes irrelevant because then what you do is you start getting very agitated and going, oh my God, I'm not sleeping. Oh my God, I'm still not sleeping. Now it's 3:00 in the morning. Now it's 4:00 in the morning. Now it's 5:00 in the morning. Oh my God, I have one more hour, et cetera. Taylor Wilson: Well, you did write in the piece about the many different recommendations that she tried to solve your own sleep issues. What were some of them, Jennifer, and did any of them help? Jennifer Senior: Oh God, I tried all the things. This is before I sought real professional help, but I did all the things. I would took Tylenol PM, which did not work. I did acupuncture, which were lovely, but did not work. I listened to a meditation tape that a friend gave me, did not work. I listened to another one that was for sleep only that did not work. I ran. I always was a runner, but I ran extra, did not work. Gosh, changed my diet. I don't remember. I did all sorts of things. I tried different supplements, Valerian root, all these things. Melatonin, nothing, nothing. Taylor Wilson: You wrote in depth about one therapy that was recommended to you, and that was CBTI. That's cognitive based therapy for insomnia. Jennifer, first, what is this? And second, did you find any success by using this? Jennifer Senior: So cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, as you said, is the gold standard for treating insomnia. It's portable. You can take it with you. It's not like if you leave your sleep meds at home. The main tent pole of it, which is sleep restriction, which I'll get to in a minute, is very hard to do. I found it murder, the kind of easier parts, although they're still in a funny way, kind of paradoxical, are you have to change your thinking around this is the cognitive piece around sleeping and insomnia. You have to decide, okay, I'm not sleeping. So what? Now, this is kind of funny because there's this din surrounding us that says, oh my God, you're not sleeping. You're going to die of a heart attack. You're going to die of an immune disease. You're going to get cancer. All these things, right? You have to set that all aside and decide one more night's sleep that I can't sleep. So what? Right. That's one thing. You have to change your behaviors, deciding that you are going to consistently go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, all that, and not use your bed for anything other than just for sleeping and sex. The hard part and the most powerful part that I found it brutal was the part that said you have to restrict your sleep. 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They're hooked on sleeping pills. It's framed as addiction, and no one says that someone is addicted to their Ozempic, even though a lifestyle change could perhaps obviate the need. No one says that they are addicted... Oh, that person is totally addicted to their blood pressure medication, even though maybe a change in lifestyle would help change that. Or that they're addicted to their statins, So I sort of bristle. And those who prescribe these medicines say like, look, if the benefit outweighs the risk and they're used properly, sometimes the real side effect is just being dependent on these drugs, and there's a difference between dependence and addiction. A surprisingly small number of people who take these drugs regularly, like benzodiazepines, like Ativan and Ambien and Klonopin, all these things, a surprisingly small number, like 7% increase their doses if they take it every night. So that's very small. However, there are cognitive decrements over time... Or not decrements. It can interfere with your memory and it can increase your odds of falling as you get older. And those are, to me, the real persuasive reasons to get off. Taylor Wilson: I want to back up a minute here to talk about something many may not be aware of, and that's that historically, at least in some eras, people used to sleep in two blocks. What do you know about this? How did this function and really why did this kind of sleep pattern work for some folks? Jennifer Senior: Well, it was sort of, I think, natural. It seemed that this is, and it has not been proven everywhere, but there's plenty of both historical evidence and also some in a lab by this wonderful guy named Tom Ware that shows that if you sort of just put someone in a room, 14 hours of darkness, what will happen is that their sleep will naturally split into two. They'll sleep for a phase, wake up for a phase, and then sleep for a phase again. 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My body was so completely dysregulated and confused about it was so all over the place that I really needed something to regularize it and stabilize it, and I flipped out, and I think if anybody goes and tries CBT, I and their practitioner says to them, and I'm going to have to be on their recommendation, do this in concert with a drug, because you really need it. Don't sit there and freak out and think that you can't or shouldn't, because it happens a lot and people freak out a lot. Taylor Wilson: All right, Jennifer Senior, thank you so much for coming on the Excerpt. Jennifer Senior: Thank you so much for having me. Taylor Wilson: Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaylee Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's the Excerpt. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Insomnia is a global epidemic. How do we fix it? | The Excerpt
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On a special episode (first released on July 24th) of The Excerpt podcast: The question is: Why do we struggle to sleep? Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic, joins The Excerpt to talk about insomnia and what we can do about solving our sleep issues. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here Taylor Wilson: Hello, I'm Taylor Wilson, and this is a special episode of the Excerpt. According to a report released by the American Medical Association earlier this year, one-third of American adults experience acute insomnia, an inability to fall or stay asleep for several days at a time, but one in 10 adults suffer from chronic insomnia. That's an inability to fall or stay asleep three nights a week for three months or more. The condition has potentially debilitating health impacts, including an increased risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and even car accidents. So the question is, why can't we sleep? Here to help me dig into the issue is Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic who recently went on her own journey to solve her insomnia and who shared her story in the magazine. Thank you for joining me, Jennifer. Jennifer Senior: Thanks for having me. Taylor Wilson: So let's start with I guess a 30,000-foot view of the issue. I know you spoke with a lot of sleep specialists, did a lot of independent research for your piece. Jennifer, what's the big picture here on American's trouble with sleep? Jennifer Senior: Right. Yeah. What's funny, I think the story was a little misnamed. I mean, this is really more story about, well, if you can't sleep, don't feel awful about it because there are so many shaming stories about people, whatever solutions people seek out. I do talk in the beginning about the way that the modern world absolutely conspires against sleep, that it just lays waste to your circadian rhythms. That people work two jobs, 16.4% of us work non-standard hours. If you're a white collar kind of professional, you've got these woodpecker like peck, peck, peck, incursions into your life all night and weekend long from your boss's work sort of never ends. I mean, we're just no longer yoked to the rhythms of the earth anymore. We're just part of this whirl of a wired world. Taylor Wilson: In the course of doing your research, was there something in particular that surprised you most about the problem? Jennifer Senior: I'll tell you what surprised me most, just generally. Whenever I interviewed any expert about this, and it didn't matter what species of expert, they could be an epidemiologist, they could be a neurologist, they could be a psychiatrist, they could be a clinician. Most of them said the same thing. There is a slight misconception that you need eight hours of sleep. There is some data saying this. There is another equally robust data set saying 6.5 to 7.4 is associated with the best health outcomes. Now it's very hard to tell. These studies are observational. They're not randomized. There was all sorts of confounds and problems with this, but this one study in particular had a million people in it. It's been replicated. There are plenty of people who believe this data and people vary. And over the course of a lifetime, your individual sleep capacity could change. In a funny way, that was what surprised me most. Right? This mantra, which is kind of a tyranny, get eight hours or else. Taylor Wilson: Well, you talked Jennifer about the modern world conspiring against us and our sleep, and I guess let's try to outline a few of the possible causes of what you call a public health emergency, right? What can you share with us here on this? Jennifer Senior: About other causes, you mean besides the kind of modernity itself and kids working on... Kids being assigned homework online, kids socializing online. I mean, adolescents are desperate for sleep. They're so hungry for it, and modern high schools and middle schools have them waking up preposterously early when their circadian rhythms are pitched forward. We've got a substantial sandwich generation that's taking care of young kids and their elderly parents. That's going to conspire against it. These are all immutable things. Also, there are elevated levels of anxiety now in our world, and anxiety itself is a huge source of... Or can be a source of sleeplessness, certainly can make one prone. So I mean, those are additional examples I suppose. Taylor Wilson: Let's talk through your story a bit here. When did you first realize that you had an issue with sleep? And walk us through your experience with insomnia. Jennifer Senior: It was 25 years ago and it was a very mysterious onset. I cannot tell you what brought it on to this day. It is a mystery. I had this extremely well-regulated kind of circadian clock. I fell asleep every night at 1:00. I woke up every day at 9:00. I lost my alarm clock. I still woke up at those times. I didn't have to buy a new alarm clock until I had an early flight one day, and yet sometime very close to my 29th birthday when virtually no circumstances in my life had changed one iota, I had a bad night, fell asleep at like 5:00. Thought nothing of it until they became more regular, and then I started doing all-nighters involuntarily, and I felt like I'd been poisoned. And to this day, I don't know what happened, but once that happens, the whole cycle starts to happen, then people suddenly become very afraid of not falling asleep and whatever kicked it off whether it's mysterious or known becomes irrelevant because then what you do is you start getting very agitated and going, oh my God, I'm not sleeping. Oh my God, I'm still not sleeping. Now it's 3:00 in the morning. Now it's 4:00 in the morning. Now it's 5:00 in the morning. Oh my God, I have one more hour, et cetera. Taylor Wilson: Well, you did write in the piece about the many different recommendations that she tried to solve your own sleep issues. What were some of them, Jennifer, and did any of them help? Jennifer Senior: Oh God, I tried all the things. This is before I sought real professional help, but I did all the things. I would took Tylenol PM, which did not work. I did acupuncture, which were lovely, but did not work. I listened to a meditation tape that a friend gave me, did not work. I listened to another one that was for sleep only that did not work. I ran. I always was a runner, but I ran extra, did not work. Gosh, changed my diet. I don't remember. I did all sorts of things. I tried different supplements, Valerian root, all these things. Melatonin, nothing, nothing. Taylor Wilson: You wrote in depth about one therapy that was recommended to you, and that was CBTI. That's cognitive based therapy for insomnia. Jennifer, first, what is this? And second, did you find any success by using this? Jennifer Senior: So cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, as you said, is the gold standard for treating insomnia. It's portable. You can take it with you. It's not like if you leave your sleep meds at home. The main tent pole of it, which is sleep restriction, which I'll get to in a minute, is very hard to do. I found it murder, the kind of easier parts, although they're still in a funny way, kind of paradoxical, are you have to change your thinking around this is the cognitive piece around sleeping and insomnia. You have to decide, okay, I'm not sleeping. So what? Now, this is kind of funny because there's this din surrounding us that says, oh my God, you're not sleeping. You're going to die of a heart attack. You're going to die of an immune disease. You're going to get cancer. All these things, right? You have to set that all aside and decide one more night's sleep that I can't sleep. So what? Right. That's one thing. You have to change your behaviors, deciding that you are going to consistently go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, all that, and not use your bed for anything other than just for sleeping and sex. The hard part and the most powerful part that I found it brutal was the part that said you have to restrict your sleep. If you had only five hours of sleep, but you're in bed for nine hours, you have to choose a wake-up time. Let's say it's 7:00 and then you have to go to bed five hours earlier, 2:00 to s7:00. That's all you can give yourself, and you cannot stop with that schedule until you've slept for the majority of those hours. That's very hard for a sleepless person. And then once you've succeeded, all you get to add on is 15 more minutes of sleep, and then you have to sleep the majority of those hours for three nights running. This is always for three nights running, and the idea is to build up a enough sleep pressure to regularize yourself. You basically capitulate to exhaustion and you start to develop a rhythm. I couldn't stick with it. I was so kind of stupid and depressed with sleeplessness by the time I started it that it probably was impractical and I refused to take drugs to help me fall asleep at the exact right hour, which many clinics recommend. If you're going to go to bed and sleep from 2:00 to 7:00, take something at 1:30 so that you fall asleep at two. But I was afraid of being dependent on drugs, and you can really wean yourself if you do it for a limited amount of time. You can wean yourself anytime really, if you're shrewd about it and if you taper. But I think that I would tell people to try it and to try it sooner rather than later, and to be unafraid of doing it in combination with drugs so that the schedule worked. Taylor Wilson: Well, I am happy you brought up drugs. I did want to bring that up just in terms of what experts are saying about their impact. Even just drugs and alcohol kind of writ large, but sleeping pills specifically. What did you find in researching this in terms of drugs and alcohol? Jennifer Senior: Well, there's a real stigma taking sleep medication, and I'm frankly a little sick of it. I'm not sure why this is so very stigmatized. Like, oh, they're drug addict. They're hooked on sleeping pills. It's framed as addiction, and no one says that someone is addicted to their Ozempic, even though a lifestyle change could perhaps obviate the need. No one says that they are addicted... Oh, that person is totally addicted to their blood pressure medication, even though maybe a change in lifestyle would help change that. Or that they're addicted to their statins, So I sort of bristle. And those who prescribe these medicines say like, look, if the benefit outweighs the risk and they're used properly, sometimes the real side effect is just being dependent on these drugs, and there's a difference between dependence and addiction. A surprisingly small number of people who take these drugs regularly, like benzodiazepines, like Ativan and Ambien and Klonopin, all these things, a surprisingly small number, like 7% increase their doses if they take it every night. So that's very small. However, there are cognitive decrements over time... Or not decrements. It can interfere with your memory and it can increase your odds of falling as you get older. And those are, to me, the real persuasive reasons to get off. Taylor Wilson: I want to back up a minute here to talk about something many may not be aware of, and that's that historically, at least in some eras, people used to sleep in two blocks. What do you know about this? How did this function and really why did this kind of sleep pattern work for some folks? Jennifer Senior: Well, it was sort of, I think, natural. It seemed that this is, and it has not been proven everywhere, but there's plenty of both historical evidence and also some in a lab by this wonderful guy named Tom Ware that shows that if you sort of just put someone in a room, 14 hours of darkness, what will happen is that their sleep will naturally split into two. They'll sleep for a phase, wake up for a phase, and then sleep for a phase again. And historically, there's all sorts of evidence that people would sleep for a phase, get up and read for a while, do some quiet things, do light tasks, maybe sing, maybe have sex, and then go back to bed. So there seemed to be two phases, and this was much easier to do when midnight was actually midnight. You were going bed when the sun had set, or just after were you were tethered to the rhythms of the earth as opposed to a wired electricity run world. Taylor Wilson: What is something you wish you knew when you first started on this journey? Jennifer Senior: To get on it earlier and to not be as afraid... Cognitive behavioral therapy is, I think, often done in conjunction with taking something like Klonopin or Ativan or Ambien, and I was so petrified of becoming hooked on them that I didn't... I refused to take them and I couldn't get my sleep to contract as a result of it. My body was so completely dysregulated and confused about it was so all over the place that I really needed something to regularize it and stabilize it, and I flipped out, and I think if anybody goes and tries CBT, I and their practitioner says to them, and I'm going to have to be on their recommendation, do this in concert with a drug, because you really need it. Don't sit there and freak out and think that you can't or shouldn't, because it happens a lot and people freak out a lot. Taylor Wilson: All right, Jennifer Senior, thank you so much for coming on the Excerpt. Jennifer Senior: Thank you so much for having me. Taylor Wilson: Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaylee Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's the Excerpt.
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Key Points Healthcare technology companies are transforming patient access and care delivery, creating massive addressable markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Digital-first platforms can scale rapidly without the infrastructure costs of traditional healthcare providers, enabling superior unit economics and profit margins. Regulatory challenges and competitive pressures create temporary volatility that often presents compelling entry points for long-term investors. 10 stocks we like better than Oscar Health › Wall Street loves to punish healthcare stocks for short-term stumbles while missing their revolutionary potential. The sector's reputation for regulatory complexity and unpredictable reimbursement changes has created a risk-averse investment environment that consistently undervalues companies building the future of American healthcare. This myopic view ignores a fundamental shift happening beneath the surface. Healthcare technology companies are dismantling decades-old barriers between patients and care, creating direct-pay models that bypass insurance bureaucracy entirely. While traditional healthcare stocks trade on Medicare Advantage enrollment growth and medical loss ratios (MLRs), these digital disruptors are building subscription-based businesses with software-like economics and massive total addressable markets. Two companies exemplify this transformation -- one sustaining strong profitability while navigating industry headwinds, the other riding explosive growth despite recent partnership drama. Both face meaningful risks that create entry opportunities for investors who understand the long-term digitization trends reshaping American healthcare. Oscar's profitable start meets cost pressures Oscar Health (NYSE: OSCR) built on its profitable start to 2025 with a strong first quarter, though emerging challenges in Q2 have tempered the momentum. The company reported $3 billion in revenue -- a 42% year-over-year increase -- and $275 million in net income, up from $177 million the previous year. This 55% profit growth underscores Oscar's scalable technology model, but investors should also consider recent indications of cost pressure and volatility. The company's MLR rose to 75.4% in the first quarter, still within industry norms but now expected to increase further, with full-year MLR guidance revised upward to 86% to 87% due to Q2 trends. This dramatic guidance revision signals significant cost headwinds that could pressure margins throughout the year. Oscar's differentiation lies in its digital-first infrastructure, built specifically for the digital age. Unlike legacy insurers, Oscar designed its operation around digital-first member engagement -- leveraging telemedicine, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered health assessments, and predictive analytics. This approach has enabled the company to serve approximately 2 million members while maintaining competitive administrative expense ratios. The +Oscar platform remains a compelling long-term opportunity, offering potential to license care navigation and engagement tools to third-party providers. While this strategy could create high-margin software revenue, monetization beyond internal use is still in early stages. Its success may prove essential as potential changes to Affordable Care Act subsidies introduce new uncertainties to the individual insurance market. Hims navigates explosive growth and regulatory crosswinds Hims & Hers Health (NYSE: HIMS) has delivered a dramatic performance through 2025, highlighting both the explosive potential and inherent risks of disruptive healthcare models. The stock reached an all-time high of $72.98 in February before encountering significant turbulence from regulatory scrutiny and partnership disputes. The company's underlying business growth remains exceptional despite headline challenges. First-quarter revenue surged 111% year over year to $586 million, while adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) nearly tripled to $91 million. More importantly, Hims & Hers expanded its subscriber base to 2.4 million customers -- a 38% increase -- with nearly 60% now using personalized treatment solutions that command premium pricing. However, the Novo Nordisk partnership termination in June caused a major decline in the stock. This dispute over Hims & Hers' continued sale of compounded weight-loss medications exposes the company's central vulnerability: regulatory dependence on legally gray areas of pharmaceutical compounding. Beyond weight management, Hims & Hers has systematically expanded into mental health, dermatology, and hormone replacement therapy -- with over 80% of 2024 revenue coming from non-GLP-1 sources. Each vertical leverages the company's direct-to-consumer infrastructure, creating cross-selling opportunities that increase customer lifetime value. Yet, this expansion strategy faces intensifying competition from well-funded digital health competitors and increasingly digital-savvy incumbents. Weighing the digital healthcare transformation The healthcare technology revolution creates compelling investment opportunities for investors who can tolerate regulatory uncertainty and competitive pressure in exchange for exposure to transformative business models. Oscar Health offers a mature, profitable approach to technology-enabled insurance with multiple avenues for margin expansion and revenue diversification. The company's established market position and strong balance sheet provide defensive characteristics, while its technology platform positions it to capture value from healthcare's digital transformation. Hims & Hers provides higher-risk, higher-reward exposure to the direct-pay healthcare revolution, where patients increasingly bypass insurance for convenient, affordable treatments. The company's ambitious 2030 targets of $6.5 billion in revenue and $1.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA reflect management's confidence in expanding beyond specialty medications into comprehensive primary care services. Should you buy stock in Oscar Health right now? Before you buy stock in Oscar Health, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Oscar Health wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $641,800!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,023,813!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,034% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 180% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of July 21, 2025 George Budwell has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Hims & Hers Health. The Motley Fool recommends Novo Nordisk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 2 Digital Healthcare Stocks Poised for a Breakout was originally published by The Motley Fool
