A NEW LOOK
Insurer startup’s user-friendly push
EVERY PARENT has been through it. Your kid wakes up crying in the middle of the night and has a high fever.
Should you call the pediatrician’s answering service? Rush to the emergency room?
A new kind of health insurance company may have the answer.
Meet Oscar (HiOscar.com), a SoHo-based health insurance startup that’s looking to disrupt the industry with a user-friendly website, a focus on guiding patients through the health care system and extra perks — including 24/7 access to board-certified doctors via the telephone.
“Our ambitions were to build an insurance company we would want for ourselves,” Oscar co-founder Joshua Kushner told the Daily News.
Oscar is one of three new insurance companies that launched on New York’s health insurance exchange Oct. 1.
The other two are Health Republic Insurance of New York, the state’s only “co-op” — the consumer-operated and oriented plan has 70,000 doctors and 132 hospitals i n its network — and North ShoreLIJ CareConnect Insurance, a provider-owned insurance company built around Long Island’s North Shore–Long Island Jewish Health System, its physicians and affiliated providers.
Oscar’s founders come from the tech world and are using their technology background to change the experience of buying health insurance and managing health services.
The company is the brainchild of Kushner, 29, the son of New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner and a tech-venture capitalist whose company, Thrive Capital, has invested in Instagram and MakerBot; Kevin Nazemi, 32, former director of customer relationship management at Microsoft, and Mario Schlosser, 35, who co-founded social gaming company Vostu with Kushner when they were students at Harvard.
Kushner, whose brother is New York Observer owner Jared Kushner — the company is named after t hei r late grandfather Oscar — said he got the idea for going into the insurance business one day after opening his insurance bill.
“I realized I didn’t understand it,” he said. “I didn’t know my benefits, I didn’t know how to file a claim.”
In contrast, Oscar’s goal is to function like the “doctor in the family,” Schlosser said.
Oscar has taken the process of “finding a doctor, telling you what is wrong, getting results, getting reminders, getting bills — and (doing) it in a more human way,” he added.
Not feeling well? A customer can log in and tell Oscar what’s wrong, much like starting a Google search.
The site will provide a list of health care providers that match the patient’s needs — with estimated costs and maps. Patients can see their entire medical history on the site.
There are extras, too: the free phone access to physicians, free generic drugs and three free doctor visits per year.
Two years in the making, the insurance startup has raised $ 55 million — investors include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel — to fund operations and claims.
Oscar operates i n nine counties in New York, including the five boroughs and Long Island. There are 40,000 physicians in its network and 73 hospitals.
Monthly premiums, which range from $218 for a catastrophic plan to $566 for a platinum plan, generally rank among the bottomthird of plans offered on NY State of Health, the company says. Whether Oscar takes off remains to be seen. The insurer is not revealing its enrollment numbers yet, but Kushner said he was “extremely satisfied with the traction.”
One hurdle is name recognition, an important factor in the health field.
“Consumers want to go with what they are familiar with,” said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health.
Oscar is pushing hard, running tongue-in-cheek ads featuring cartoon characters.
“We didn’t start this company because we love health insurance,” reads one of them. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
pfurman@nydailynews.com