The rapidly-growing plans are quite popular with retirees, now covering over a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries, and MA could provide a template for market-oriented reform of the Medicare system.
Years later Ma co-founded an online sports stock market called Protrade.com (which Forbes profiled in 2006) and later a company called CitizenSports, recently purchased by Yahoo!
He has had a solid success on his second trip to the plate as the founder and CEO of online game accelerator Sichuan Xunyou Network Technology, a company that supports up to 4, 000 online games in an online game market that has spawned billionaires such as Chen Tianqiao of Shanda Games, Ma Huateng of Tencent and William Ding of Netease.