The Health Insurance Founder That Hates Insurance | Oscar Health Co-founder Mario Schlosser

Health insurance has a Net Promoter Score of around 0-10 industry-wide, one of the lowest ratings of any industry. This is exactly why the founders of Oscar Health, with no background in healthcare and a distaste for the industry, started the company in 2012. Since then, Oscar has grown to 1.7 million members, gone public, and achieved profitability—all while receiving an NPS significantly higher than the industry average.

In this episode, we talk with Mario Schlosser, co-founder and CTO of Oscar Health, about building a tech-first health insurance company in an industry notorious for poor customer experiences.

We cover: 

🏥 Why outsiders without healthcare backgrounds decided to tackle the insurance industry

💰 How Oscar grew to 1.7 million members while maintaining a 60+ NPS score in a hard-to-please industry

📊 The balance between denying unnecessary care and empathetically supporting members

⚙️ How ICHRAs (Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements) are disrupting traditional employer-sponsored healthcare

🧶 The beginning of the unraveling of the employer markets

💼 The changing employer healthcare market and why small businesses are seeking alternatives

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About our guest:

Mario Schlosser is the Co-Founder & CTO at Oscar Health. In this role, Mario leads product and engineering, with a focus on building Oscar’s technology platform for the future and continuing to set the strategy for the +Oscar strategy.

Previously, Mario served as CEO of Oscar, leading the company from inception to serving over 1M members across Individual & Family, Medicare Advantage, and Small Group health plans.

Before co-founding Oscar, Mario also co-founded the largest social gaming company in Latin America, where he led the company's analytics and game design practices. Prior to that, Mario was a Senior Investment Associate at Bridgewater Associates and worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Europe, the U.S. and Brazil.

Mario also spent time as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he wrote and co-authored 10 computer science publications, including one of the most-cited computer science papers published in the past decade, in which he developed the EigenTrust Algorithm to securely compute trust in randomized networks. In May 2019, Mario and his co-authors, Sepandar D. Kamvar (Mosaic Building Group Inc) and Héctor Garcia-Molina (Celo), received the prestigious Seoul Test of Time Award from the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) for this work.

Mario holds a degree in computer science with highest distinction from the University of Hannover in Germany and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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