As insurers nationwide prepare to take their latest Medicare products to market this fall, SCAN Group is doubling down on an unconventional growth strategy meant to grab the attention of seniors and healthcare leaders alike.
“You can’t solve a problem until you actually acknowledge you have a problem,” SCAN President and CEO Sachin Jain, MD, told Becker’s. “We’re in wartime in U.S. healthcare, and many folks have adopted a peacetime mentality.”
The nonprofit insurer took to the airwaves ahead of last year’s annual enrollment period to declare its own industry broken as part of a campaign described by Dr. Jain as “hostile marketing.” Across television, print, radio and digital advertisements meant to sell SCAN health plans, seniors were shown dealing with unhelpful automated customer service lines, denied care and prescription drug coverage headaches.
“SCAN sees it. And SCAN is fighting to change it,” one of the ads concluded.
“We did something fairly unique and revolutionary in an industry where most of our competitors are plastering billboards talking about how great they are,” Dr. Jain said. “We’re taking a different approach, which is actually aligning with the experience of seniors today, which is complicated and challenging.”
The campaign preceded the most successful enrollment period in SCAN’s nearly 50-year history, during which the insurer added 127,000 members and catapulted into the top 10 largest MA plans in the country. The company now has nearly 460,000 members and pulled in $8 billion in revenue last year. Its growth came as most of the biggest MA carriers retrenched by paring down product portfolios and exiting markets as they prioritized profit margins over membership growth, a strategy that’s shown no sign of slowing down ahead of next year.
While Dr. Jain acknowledged it’s hard to attribute the company’s 40% enrollment growth directly to the campaign, he said it has received positive feedback from members and caregivers, and sparked conversations within the healthcare industry – sometimes not positive.
“There was an executive from a major national health plan that said ‘Why are you focusing on health insurance? The whole system is broken,'” he said. “We actually had another competitor say, ‘Well, we are not broken.’ That was their response to it, which I thought was quite hilarious.”
SCAN plans to renew the campaign this fall, coming as the company made national headlines this week with the announcement that it would sell jointly-branded MA plans with Costco in two states and a Medicare supplement plan in a third in the near future. The move follows other unique products launched by SCAN in recent years, including plans built specifically for Asian American and LGBTQ+ seniors and provider-partnered plans with health systems like Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health.
“When you look across healthcare and you look at truly great organizations, there are the organizations that buy their own BS, and then there are the organizations that are skeptical of their own BS and almost positively disgusted by their own BS,” Dr. Jain said. “That’s the kind of company that we want to be at SCAN.”
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