Oscar, an innovative, successful insurance carrier serving Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco for 3 years, has just announced that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is planning to invest $375 million in the company. Alphabet had previously invested in Oscar through its Capital G venture fund but the latest investment will put Alphabet at a roughly 10% stake in the company. Alphabet will place Salar Kamangar, former CEO of YouTube, on Oscar’s board of directors.
Oscar has been unique in its business model by investing heavily in its technology and user experience. Oscar provides its members with a free concierge service with each insurance policyholder assigned 4 care guides, one of which is a nurse. Oscar’s concierge team can direct patients to doctors or facilities tailored to each person’s unique medical needs. For Los Angeles, Oscar is contracted with some of the prestigious hospital systems such as UCLA, USC, and Providence. In Orange County, Oscar is in-network for Hoag, Mission, St. Jude & St. Joseph hospitals. In San Francisco, UCSF, Sequoia and Seton in-network.
Furthermore, Oscar members can take advantage of free telemedicine by being able to talk to doctors on call 24/7 to get basic diagnoses and even prescriptions for common things such as the flu. Mario Schlosser, CEO of Oscar, summed it up in an interview with WIRED’: “We have our own claims system we’ve been building, we have our own clinical management system, we built our networks ourselves—pretty much everything that we do internally to manage people’s health care was reinvented and rebuilt from a technology perspective”
With a big data company like Alphabet investing heavily into Oscar, a company focused on reinventing the health insurance wheel from a big data tech perspective, it will be very interesting to see how this relationship plays out. It is clear that Oscar is growing. In the first half of 2018, net revenues doubled from the year prior to $363 million with a modest $5 million in profit and Oscar expects over $1 billion in net revenues for the calendar year.
In June, Oscar recently started offering group health insurance in California. If you are a small business interested in learning more about Oscar, please do not hesitate to contact us. Oscar’s EPO plans are very competitively priced to the PPO and HMO carriers while still offering a prestigious provider network. Oscar is priced similar to Kaiser’s HMO for both the small business and individual market.
At Solid Health Insurance Services, our services are completely free of charge and the premiums are the same as if you go to the insurance carrier directly. Our mission at Solid Health Insurance Services is to find for you affordable health insurance, life insurance, long-term care insurance and travel insurance which fits your medical needs and budget for your individual, family and business needs. Please contact us at 310-909-6135 or at info@solidhealthinsurance.com.