Oscar Health: A CTO’s Blueprint for the Future of Insurance, Mario Schlosser

In this episode, Mario Schlosser, Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Oscar Health, emphasized his belief that the future of health insurance lies in decentralization, with providers taking on more responsibility for the role that insurers have traditionally played. 

He argued that insurance companies, as they currently exist, act as unnecessary middlemen that add limited value to the system. Instead, Schlosser envisions a model where caregivers evolve to function like insurers, combining payment and care delivery into a unified structure. 

He highlighted how Oscar Health’s technology-first infrastructure is designed not just for its own members but as a platform that providers could adopt, helping them manage care and financial risk more seamlessly. This integrated approach, he believes, would create a more efficient system that better aligns incentives to improve outcomes while reducing costs

At the same time, Schlosser was clear that Oscar Health’s guiding mission is centered on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace, which he described as the company’s “north star.” With millions of Americans relying on ACA plans, he sees this market as the proving ground for new models of consumer-focused, technology-enabled coverage. 

By focusing exclusively on the ACA  in the 18 states it serves, Oscar is doubling down on serving individuals directly, ensuring affordability, better navigation, and improved health outcomes. Schlosser tied this vision to a broader hope: that U.S. healthcare will evolve toward an individualized system where people can stay with the insurance and care model they trust for the long term, making the ACA both a foundation and a catalyst for the transformation he wants to see.

BIO

Mario Schlosser is the Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer 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 +Oscar.

Previously, Mario served as CEO of Oscar, leading the company from inception to serving over 1M members. 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.