Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess and I talk about Oscar raising $225 million, Evidation Health raising $45 million doing digital clinical trials, Lululemon buying fitness startup Mirror for $500 million, Calibrate raising a $5.1 million seed round bringing telehealth to weight loss and metabolic health, at-home urine analysis startup Healthy.io buying Inui Health for $9 million, and Airvet raising $14 million for veterinary telemedicine. —Matthew Holt
Will Medicare Advantage (MA) Startup Plans Be The Future?
By ANDY MYCHKOVSKY
Would it blow your mind if only five startup health plans interested in Medicare Advantage (MA) have collectively raised over $3.9 billion in private funding to-date? Well, readers, that is the reality. Now I know there are some skeptics out in the healthcare ecosystem, so I’m here to break down some of the investment thesis. Not going to necessarily defend, but explain some reasons why you should love and hate these investments. Let’s start with who raised these mind-boggling sums of money. The five startups are Oscar Health, Bright Health, Clover Health, Devoted Health, and Alignment Healthcare.
- Oscar Health has raised $1.3 billion
- Bright Health has raised $1.1 billion
- Clover Health has raised $925 million
- Devoted Health has raised $362 million
- Alignment Healthcare has raised $240 million
I think it’s safe to say that the MA insurance market (also known as Medicare Part C) has captured the imagination of the venture capital and private equity community. The changing demographic trends of an aging baby boomer population, the increased selection of MA plans versus traditional Medicare fee-for-service (FFS), and the opportunity of technology-first MA startup plans to better reduce administrative fees (“Administrative Loss Ratio” or “ALR”) and control medical spend (“Medical Loss Ratio” or “MLR”) seems too good to pass up. If you were going to start a health plan, of all the lines of business you could be focused on, MA has highest profit margins, growing population, and better potential to impact patient spend and manage chronic diseases. It is certainly harder than writing the previous statement, but there are some real benefits versus the traditional commercial or Medicaid managed care.
Continue reading…WTF Health | Oscar’s Schlosser on Consumerizing Health Plans, post-ACA & pre-Amazon/JPM/BH
WTF Health – ‘What’s the Future’ Health? is a new interview series about the future of the health industry and how we love to hate WTF is wrong with it right now. Can’t get enough? Check out more interviews at www.wtf.health.
Having formerly worked for a health plan, I geek out over health plan innovation as IMO it’s the underpinning of the true disruption of health care. When the incentives change, everything else will change too…
So when I met Mario Schlosser, co-founder & CEO of Oscar Health at Health Datapalooza, I may or may not have asked him to sign my Oscar insurance card. (Yep, I’m a member.)
Our chat focused his push to continue driving health plan innovation amid the deterioration of the ACA and his plans for Oscar’s latest $165M round. His goal: make the payer “an interface and enabler of new kinds of technologies.” Is that even possible?!
Around 4:15 minute mark we find out if he’s been tapped for advice from the Berkshire Hathaway/Amazon/JP Morgan health alliance as they take on their own challenges disrupting health insurance.
Can Oscar Succeed In Making Health Insurance Fun? Maybe Not Just Yet. But the Startup Is Shaking Things Up …
Last week I went to a panel presentation sponsored by the group NYC Health Business Leaders on the rollout of New York State’s health insurance exchange. Among the speakers was Mario Schlosser, the co-founder and co-CEO of the venture-capital-backed start-up health insurance company Oscar Health, which offers a full range of plans through New York’s exchange.
As NPR reported last month in a story about Oscar, “it’s been years since a new, for-profit health insurance company launched in the U.S.”, but the Affordable Care Act created a window of opportunity for new entrants.
Schlosser began his talk by giving us a tour of his personal account on Oscar’s website, www.hioscar.com. Among other things, he showed us the Facebook-like timeline, updated in real time, which tracks his two young children’s many visits to the pediatrician.
He typed “my tummy hurts” into the site’s search engine and the site provided information on what might be wrong and on where he might turn for help, ranging from a pharmacist to a gastroenterologist, with cost estimates for each option.
Additional searches yielded information on covered podiatrists accepting new patients with offices near his apartment and on the out-of-pocket cost of a prescription for diazepam (which was zero, since there is no co-payment for generic drugs for Oscar enrollees).
As an audience member noted, none of this is new exactly. What is new is to have this kind of data-driven, state-of-the-art user experience being offered by a health insurer. Schlosser told the audience that Oscar’s pharmacy benefit manager and other vendors are providing the company with real-time data that other insurers have not demanded.
