Medicare Advantage plans in New York City and Houston beginning next year — and its strategy provides some valuable insight regarding how new entrants could approach the MA market. Oscar will partner with Bronx-based health system Montefiore in New York, and with a mix of physician groups and individual hospitals in Houston.The insurtech's plan is to experiment and find out which of the two competing approaches works best.
Oscar is smart to plot its course into the MA market carefully: Big insurers dominate the space and patients are more costly than those on traditional Medicare. Oscar needs to pump up its membership after its growth greatly decelerated from 2018's explosive 170% year-over-year increase to an 8% YoY uptick in 2019, which we've touched on as a cause of