CHOICE Arrangements at Oscar

At Oscar, our mission is to make a healthier life accessible and affordable for all. We believe that a larger individual market is the best solution for Americans and view CHOICE Arrangements (formerly ICHRA, Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements) as the future of health benefits. Just like the 401k revolutionized retirement planning, CHOICE Arrangements are poised to transform health benefits by putting the individual in control, while also giving employers reduced and predictable healthcare costs. Demand and awareness are growing, and Oscar is paving the way for the future of CHOICE Arrangements.

Why CHOICE Arrangements?

A CHOICE Arrangement is a great option for both employers and employees, providing:

Flexibility: Employers can tailor contributions to different classes of employees, providing a customizable approach to health benefits.
Affordability: Employers have predictable costs by setting defined contribution amounts, avoiding the unpredictability of traditional group health insurance premiums.
Choice: Employees can choose individual health plans that best meet their schedules, locations, and health needs, enhancing satisfaction and coverage suitability.
Portability: Employees can keep their plan design, mid-year accumulations towards deductibles, and provider network, if and when they leave their employer.

What is CHOICE Connect?

CHOICE Connect is an open source, universal, company-agnostic integration specification designed to reduce friction, encourage faster growth of the CHOICE market, and allow CHOICE administrators to integrate seamlessly with carriers. Oscar’s goal is to prove the viability of administrator-to-carrier interoperability and set a standard for a functioning CHOICE marketplace.

CHOICE Connect will streamline shopping, enrollment, billing, and other operational workflows to offer a CHOICE experience that rivals or surpasses traditional group plans. CHOICE Connect will standardize data reconciliation and eligibility updates, bringing CHOICE on par with group and on-exchange ACA experiences. Additionally, Oscar intends to establish shared data integration standards to enhance collaboration among CHOICE stakeholders and foster a more efficient market.

Our Singular Focus

With CHOICE Connect, Oscar aims to create a shared technical infrastructure that enables carriers and administrators to work together to scale the CHOICE market.

How We’re Doing It

Oscar is developing an open integration specification to streamline CHOICE workflows, including:

Shopping & Enrollment
Eligibility
Billing & Payment
Other operational workflows necessary to offer a CHOICE experience that is on par or better than the group plan experience

Oscar understands that the landscape of health benefits, especially CHOICE Arrangements, is constantly evolving. To stay ahead of these changes:

Oscar is developing specifications in collaboration with CHOICE administrators and other carriers through working groups.
Oscar’s standards will explicitly ensure that member data is easily reconcilable and that member eligibility status is as accurate as possible between vendors and carriers.
Oscar’s integration standards will continuously evolve to meet new challenges and opportunities.
Oscar plans to develop a RESTful API standard that will further streamline integrations, enhance interoperability, and provide a more seamless experience for all stakeholders involved in the CHOICE ecosystem.

Open Source

The CHOICE Connect integration specification is open source and licensed under a commercially permissive Apache 2.0 License. We welcome you to use the CHOICE Connect specification to power your data integration. You can also contribute bugs, feature, and improvements by joining our working group or filing an Issue in our Github repo. The source code the specifications can be found at github.com/oscarhealth/IchraConnect.

How to Integrate with Oscar

If you’re interested in setting up a CHOICE integration with Oscar, please reach out to for more information or see our high-level overview and technical specifications for CHOICE integrations.

Adopt the CHOICE Connect Specification

If you are a carrier interested in modifying or adopting the CHOICE Connect integration specifications, please reach out to join our working groups. Contact us via email!

Oscar's CHOICE Platform Partners