Health Care Is Broken. Google Thinks Oscar Health Can Fix It

In the late 1990s, two graduate students named in Stanford's computer science department set out to organize the world's information. Shortly thereafter, a visiting scholar named Mario Schlosser arrived on campus, set on figuring out how trust could be built into peer-to-peer networks. The original server used by the graduate students, who were now running a little outfit named Google, had formerly been crammed under a desk in the office Schlosser now used. Now, twenty years later, the graduate students have done OK, and they no longer need to borrow server space. But they've continually been stifled by one kind of information that's very hard to organize: health care data. The industry in America is a mess: yoked together with confusing regulations, perverse incentives, and computers running Windows XP. Meanwhile, Schlosser, has moved on from academia and created a company, called Oscar, with Joshua Kushner (brother of Jared) to try to solve those problems. The goal of Oscar is to do to health care what Uber did to the taxi industry: use smart digital technology to make everything faster and easier for customers, and then use the data gathered to build radically new services, which can collect more data that leads to new services. Google invested early in Oscar through its venture capital fund Capital G and its health services spinoff, Verily. Neither company will give exact figures, but it seems that Alphabet will now own roughly ten percent of the Oscar. One of Google earliest employees, Salar Kamangar, the former CEO of YouTube, will also join Oscar's board. I spoke with Schlosser for an hour on Monday about the deal, privacy, data, and whether, one day, we'll actually treat our gastroenteritis through an app.