A new kind of Medicare Advantage advertisement is hitting the airwaves, one diverging from the usual scenes of seniors gleefully enjoying an outdoor activity or making a medical appointment against a backdrop of upbeat music.
Instead, a more blunt framing is the centerpiece of a new national campaign from SCAN declaring that “health insurance is broken.”
Launched Aug. 25 across television, print, radio and digital platforms, the company says its latest marketing reflects the frustrations that millions of older adults face: delayed or denied care and long wait times.
“I’ve encouraged the team to be comfortable with calling our baby ugly,” Sachin Jain, MD, president and CEO of SCAN Group, told Becker’s. “Nothing gets better unless you acknowledge the truth about where it is today. Coming out of the events of the last year and the murder of Brian Thompson, we heard very clearly from beneficiaries and Americans across the country that they are frustrated with the health insurance industry. It’s grounded in abnormal practices that we’ve normalized.”
The California-based insurer is the second-largest nonprofit health plan in the U.S., covering more than 300,000 members in five states, with a sixth on the way. Dr. Jain has led the company since 2020 after serving as senior advisor to former CMS Administrator Donald Berwick, MD, and as a senior executive across parts of Anthem (now Elevance Health).
“I think by naming the problem, we’re starting a national conversation that needs to happen in a way others are not engaging in. Our team has done something pioneering,” he said.
SCAN leadership says the campaign goes back to the insurer’s 1977 origin, when 12 seniors in Long Beach helped organize a healthcare network because they wanted better services, but couldn’t access them easily.
One of the new ads posted to YouTube in August depicts seniors dealing with unhelpful automated customer service, denied prior authorizations and prescription drug coverage issues.
“Too often in healthcare, it’s easy to point the finger elsewhere,” Dr. Jain said. “But the issues highlighted in the ad are all things we can fix without government intervention. We can answer phones better. We can be more human. We can reduce wait times. Leaders point the finger at themselves and say, ‘We can be better.’ If I can get one more healthcare executive to speak honestly about what’s actually going on, we’ve done something right.”
“People in this industry have become numb, telling themselves a story that justifies what they’re doing for shareholders. We’re challenging that,” he added.
For SCAN, being a nonprofit is part of the message to lure new members away from larger MA plans that have made headlines in recent years for making it difficult to receive timely care or overcharging the government. Part of that lure is emphasizing that the company consistently earns high Star ratings and industry accolades for customer satisfaction.
“We’re hearing overwhelmingly positive feedback,” Nishant Shukla, SCAN’s chief marketing officer, said. “Members tell me they finally feel heard and see their experiences reflected. Members say SCAN is better and different, but they still experience some of these issues. They love that we’re willing to call those out and fight to improve.”
He added that while the campaign will be measured by brand awareness and enrollment growth, its bigger ambition is to transform the industry.
“Certainly, we’ll track marketing metrics like brand awareness, but the real goal is to spark change and transform healthcare,” Mr. Shukla said. “And the other piece is how many people decide to join SCAN in this enrollment period. We’ll know we’re doing our job if we grow.”
The new “hostile marketing,” as Dr. Jain describes it, is not designed to flatter, but to provoke.
“Denial is not a strategy in 2025,” he wrote to his 200,000 LinkedIn followers when describing the responses the campaign has already drawn from other health insurance leaders, some supportive, and others skeptical of its scope.
“I know it’s broken, what’s the most effective way to fix it?” Bryony Winn, president of Elevance’s Carelon Health, wrote back to Dr. Jain. “Denial is not a strategy. Agreed. But neither is identifying problems and having no solutions…at scale. That is where we are collectively struggling. And where we should put our collective energy.”
Ali Khan, MD, chief medical officer for Aetna’s Medicare business, offered another perspective: “I’m seeing recognition of the need to change across the industry, but I think where we stumble is that, for most payors, we are used to being carriers — not necessarily clinical operators. Without that optimal set of operational chops and deep market relationships, we then stumble in scaling and maintaining the execution needed to rebuild trust. We have to get the ideas and the infrastructure right to scale.”
The Medicare annual enrollment period begins Oct. 15, with seniors facing a quickly-changing environment to navigate as insurers nationwide pull back on unprofitable markets.
“We refuse to normalize a broken system,” Mr. Shukla of SCAN said. “This campaign holds us accountable to deliver something different. Not perfection, but progress.”
