Insurance start-up Oscar Health move jobs to Arizona
Insurance start-up Oscar Health is laying off 31 member services employees at its Soho location and moving the job roles to its Tempe, Arizona call centre. The company says that the move will allow it to extend its services beyond New York City and to grow Oscar Health’s presence in Arizona. The firm lost $92.4m last year, and has withdrawn from state exchanges, citing heavy losses.

Oscar Health is laying off 31 employees at its headquarters in the Puck Building in Soho.

The cuts at the insurance startup — co-founded by 31-year-old tech tycoon Josh Kushner, the brother of real estate scion and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — revealed in a state filing last week that the layoffs slammed its “member services team.”

The jobs cut in the Empire State are being shipped to a recently opened customer-service call center in Tempe, Ariz., sources close to the company said.

While affected New York workers were offered positions in Tempe, it wasn’t clear whether any took the offers, the source said.

Reached Tuesday, an Oscar spokeswoman confirmed the New York layoffs.

“This move allows us to meaningfully extend our operations beyond NYC as we transition our customer experience into a new model,” the company said in a statement.

“At the same time, opening a West Coast-based office is part of our broader plans to continue to grow Oscar’s presence in the region.”

Oscar — a high-tech ObamaCare play that has sought to lure customers to its health plans with quirky cartoon ads and a sleek mobile app — has lately been forced to withdraw from state exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, including the exchange in New Jersey, citing heavy losses.

In June, Oscar announced it would slash by half, beginning in 2017, the number of providers in its New York network while also hiking premiums by an average of 16 percent.

Oscar, which has raised more than $700 million from investors like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, lost $92.4 million in New York last year.