11 ms·

Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

232 points by gurgeous 15y ago

gurgeous 15y ago
I'm releasing the first version of PickHealthInsurance today. It helps you compare health insurance plans (individual, not group) in the US. I put this together over a few weekends. My COBRA is about to run out and I found it exceptionally difficult to compare plans and prices with the existing sites. This is the third time I've had to buy individual insurance and I finally decided to do something about it. Things crystallized for me when I almost bought a plan that claimed to cover maternity, only to discover late in the game that it had a separate $20,000 maternity deductible! What a mess! I have a few goals with PickHealthInsurance: - start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions - explain confusing terms like "coinsurance" and point out the difference between a PPO and a POS. - show plan stats up front, not buried deep within the bowels of the application process - make it easy to use and blazingly fast Built with: - Rails 3.1 (HAML, Sass, Coffeescript) - Twitter Bootstrap CSS - Deployed on Heroku/MongoHQ What do you think?
- charliepark 15y ago
  This looks fantastic. Seriously, really good. I'd love to be able to specify the number of children I'd be putting on my plan (maybe not on that first page, but on an internal "refine" page?). Also, it'd be great to have checkboxes allowing me to select two or three plans, to then compare them head-to-head. But, again, this is an excellent first version. I look forward to seeing where it goes.
  - lftl 15y ago
    I suppose some states may have different regulations effecting the system, but every plan I've ever seen doesn't differentiate based on the number of dependents you have. Rates are effectively tiered to single, married, or family.
    - noahnoahnoah 15y ago
      This varies significantly from state-to-state, by insurer, and even by plan. In places that do price based on actually composition for family plans, there's rarely a particularly linear correlation between family size and rates. (Also, good luck getting an insurer to tell you your actual rate on an online tool :/)
- runako 15y ago
  I really like it. I had to buy health insurance not too long ago, and I used one of the incumbent online services. The experience wasn't all that bad, but your site beats them in the first step of refining carriers/plans to see which ones I should consider. It also feels a lot more transparent. Also, I really like that it's fast. Don't lose that part. :-)
- emp_ 15y ago
  What is your take on the Twitter Bootstrap (assuming you are not involved in its development) in terms of productivity?
  - gurgeous 15y ago
    Twitter Bootstrap is completely awesome. I could never make it look this good on my own, especially with full browser testing.
- ora600 15y ago
  I love the explanation of terms. Highly useful. It also highlights the near complete lack of correlation between how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get.
- marklubi 15y ago
  Pretty nice but could really use another search option for a single parent with children.
- PaulHoule 15y ago
  The cheapest rate I see is more than three times what I'm paying for COBRA insurance. It's a better plan than the plan I'm on, but I know a lot of people make less than that much a month. Yikes!
- dgallagher 15y ago
  Very nice. It's EONS better than Massachusetts' health insurance website (https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ https://www.mahealthconnector.org/). Idea: Perhaps add columns so you can sort plans by co-pay for Doctor visits, ER visits, an prescriptions? Maybe hide those columns by default so the GUI doesn't get too cluttered, but let users display them if desired.
  - gurgeous 15y ago
    I'm trying not to clutter the UI. Ethan (my co-founder from Urbanspoon) came up with the idea for the "office visit" icon. I used to have that in a column and it was just too much, even on my enormous monitor.
- tednaleid 15y ago
  Looks nice, I like the clean presentation, much easier to use than eHealthInsurance, or going to the individual carrier's websites (if you even know who they all are). My startup, Bloom Health (http://gobloomhealth.com http://gobloomhealth.com) is in a similar space, but where you're going directly to consumer's who are shopping for their own health insurance (B2C), we're a B2B2C model, we work with employers and provide health insurance choices to their employees. We work within the employer system by changing from the existing defined benefit health insurance model (where employees get health insurance as a benefit for working for their employer) to a defined contribution model (where employees get a set amount of pre-tax money from their employer to spend however they want, including health/dental/HSA/etc.
- duncanj 15y ago
  I think it needs sliders to adjust the deductible, coinsurance, etc.
  - gurgeous 15y ago
    More like kayak? I thought about adding the sliders, but it feels like the filtering is sufficient.
    - duncanj 15y ago
      well, when I sort on deductible, I have to mentally categorize all of the prices based on the other features even though I know I am not going to accept, say, 30% coinsurance. If I could max the deductible at x and the coinsurance at y then I could sort by price.
- separated 15y ago
  Have you heard of finder.healthcare.gov? It provides more detailed information with a few basic questions. It also provides a range of premiums per hit, and most important (in my opinion) gives feedback on how likely one is to actually land the quoted premium. The site was built by HHS, which had access to information provided by the insurance companies themselves on their acceptance rates, etc. I'm not sure why the insurance companies agreed to provide that sort of information, nor whether that information was made available to the public at large.
- MJR 15y ago
  - start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions Your core problem is going to be that approximate rates are based on answers to questions. The fewer questions you answer the less accurate your rate will be. Go talk to a few agents and let them draw out the benefits for you, they are free to you and they exist for this very purpose!
  - xtracto 15y ago
    Why not add some kind of price range instead of a point price?.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Honestly, this is amazing. The big qualifier is, "YMMV", depending on medical history. If you could parlay some deals with the insurance companies related to being an "authorized reseller" where you could input Medical History and come out with a Comparative List that you could sign up for.... you'd be sitting pretty. IMO.
- zeraholladay 15y ago
  Thanks, you're awesome! This was exactly what I needed. I'm switching jobs and receiving a monthly figure to buy insurance. It's very easy to use, looks clean and PDQ. Great work.
- neovive 15y ago
  Looks great and definitely fills a great need. Definitely consider a side-by-side comparison option for the plans. BTW: Twitter Bootstrap looks like a great base template. I'm surprised I have never seen it before.
gdhillon 15y ago
Looks great, Clean UI and fast. Give option to compare plans side by side.
savrajsingh 15y ago
Great job, much easier than ehealthisurance.com when I used it a couple years ago.
dmillar 15y ago
Very interesting. Where is your data coming from?
ck2 15y ago
FYI your stylesheet is being served with html at the end (an error page) which is causing it to fail.
natbro 15y ago
sweet! serendipitously just what i need this week picking insurance and all the information more quickly and better organized than sites like ehealthinsurance.com et al. wants: - side-by-side comparison (check several, show all) - easy print-out of plans and side-by-sides, or PDF-gen - tool-tips for filters at left. nice tool-tips on terms in rows already - filter by deductible, co-pay, premium amnts (eg <$500)?
chadkeck 15y ago
Very nice! Your sorting by deductible doesn't work correctly.
bartman 15y ago
Great site, I especially like the explanations for the different terms. How did you get all the insurance rates and terms, just from the companies' sites? When I tried evaluating the health care plans my company offered me a few month ago I had a terribly hard time getting information about the different plans that are out there. (But then again, I'm not from the US and the whole health care system keeps confusing me.)
stcorbett 15y ago
It would be cool if I could see my existing plan on there and be able to compare apples to apples. They keep raising my premium, it would be nice to know if there was something else out there that had a lower premium.
MatthewB 15y ago
Cool site, needs some visual work but the idea is there. I have the same question as other people - how are you pulling this data? One thing you definitely need on the front page is gender selection. Gender instantly changes the price of insurance significantly and is a simple binary question. I hate dealing with health insurance so much so I very much hope this site evolves and becomes a success for you. Well done. Edit: Now you need to monetize this. The obvious way to do that is to do lead gen if they offer it.
- pbreit 15y ago
  I'm curious what "visual work" you feel is necessary? I quite like the simple and clear visual design and wish more web sites would do the same.
stcorbett 15y ago
Have you used an agent before? Their whole business is about helping individuals and businesses pick plans. My agent has shown me some good data sheets that get close to giving you apples to apples comparisons. I bet you could borrow a lot from their business models.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
I hope this is your full time gig. Picking a health insurance is one of the hardest problems ever. I do not know the business and I fear I am going to get screwed. If I had launched such a nice service I would try to charge the end user. I would be willing to pay money to an independent third party.
marquis 15y ago
This is timely - we were just looking for this an hour ago and wondering why it didn't exist! Thanks HN.
rglover 15y ago
Considering I'm currently without health insurance, this is extremely helpful. Love how simple the interface is and how it gives you an easy to understand list of providers. Excellent work.
Robin_Message 15y ago
Sorting by price sorts alphabetically, not numerically. I put in some details from when I was living in the US and I'm shocked—I can't find a plan that isn't 50% copay on brand name drugs?
faramarz 15y ago
Can't you claim a commission much like how brokers work? ..and if so, I wonder how you would do that. or, just become broker yourself and keep the leads, then pass them off to the Insurance company with leveraged commissions. Very cool site.
danielparks 15y ago
Very nice. I just went through the process of picking a health insurance plan using ehealthinsurance.com, and it was a bit of a pain. The one thing that would have made things a lot easier for me is being able to sort by out-of-pocket maximum. I wanted a high-deductible, HSA-compatible plan, and so having a low out of pocket maximum was my number one criteria. I wonder how many people actually know what they want in a health insurance plan? There are a huge number of options, and it's hard to know what's important. The guidance I found on the web tended to be generic, rather than targeted at the type of plan I wanted (major medical). Perhaps you could outline a few broad plan types, explain the advantages, and allow users to pick one? For example, I would have picked a "major medical plan", and it would have shown me plans that have solid out-of-pocket maximums that aren't much higher than the deductible. The data displayed for each plan would highlight differences between those plans (e.g. HSA-eligible) that might not be so important to a another plan type (e.g. full service plans).
jessevondoom 15y ago
This is incredibly helpful. I run a small OSS/music nonprofit and as you'd imagine there's not a lot of money in that. Having just gone through the process of looking around for insurance for my family I can say that is was an amazing contrast to the overwhelming and unpleasant experience of using insurance provider sites. I'm notoriously cheap, but would happily shell out a commission or even a one time fee for the service — keep it this simple and straightforward and you'll not only have a compelling business but a tool that really helps people.
rmason 15y ago
Great idea! But you need at a minimum to add one more question: desired deductible. I ended up with 79 plans and that is a bit much to sort through. Perhaps you could have a slider on the results that let you manually set the minimum deductible. Also I assume the charge listed was monthly but you didn't state that.
cedsav 15y ago
Looks great, but returns 0 plan that includes maternity coverage in my area. I don't know if it's an issue with the app, or just the sad state of health insurance in the US... probably a bit of both.
- megamark16 15y ago
  I found 6 plans with maternity coverage in my area (Kansas City). I'm sure they all have 2 year waiting periods, but that's not gurgeous' fault :-)
- gurgeous 15y ago
  Not a bug, sadly. That's just the way it is in some spots. We're lucky up here in Seattle.
fludlight 15y ago
Very cool. I wish I had this when shopping for insurance a year ago. A "total annual cost" column would be helpful for making sense of the deductible/premium/co-pay relationship. Think of it as the "Price+Shipping+Tax" on shopping websites. Ask the user how much he expects his doctors to charge him ("Annual Medical Bill") in the next twelve months, then calculate how much he would pay to the doctors and to the insurance company. Last time I bought health insurance I had to make a spreadsheet to calculate this. I would rather not repeat that mundane task again. It might also be useful to have multiple predefined Annual Med Bills ($0, $1,000, $5,000, $20,000, etc). Displaying the output on a graph might make sense (AnnMedBill vs TotalAnnCost, with a curve for each plan). You should customize these to the user's age (a 23 year old may not go to the doctor for years at a time, but even a healthy 50yo will definitely go several times per year for checkups and *oscopies). Mapping costs to life events (no doctor visits, a few visits, broken arm, healthy pregnancy, etc) would make it even more useful, but researching the necessary assumptions will take considerable work so just implement predefined dollar amounts as a version 1. Keep up the good work, this idea has value!
- gurgeous 15y ago
  I've toyed with adding some elaborate calculators. Last time I went through this exercise I built a rube-goldberg spreadsheet that let me plug in doctor's visits, major illness, deductible, premium, etc. and spat out a yearly number. It was just too complicated, though. Most people don't even understand what "coinsurance" is. I might add some pretty calculators later if the site gets some traffic.
  - fludlight 15y ago
    >> Most people don't even understand what "coinsurance" is. That's exactly why you should add a calculator, so people can see how the variables interact.
randomguy33 15y ago
The rates your app returned were vastly different than running the same rate on numerous carrier websites. Your site showed rates that were sometimes less than half what the carrier site reported. How do you generate your rates? Your math seems dangerously wrong in a lot of places, especially when requesting family rates. (This is verifiable by running a rate on this website, and then going to one of the carriers websites and generating the same quote) Disclaimer: I work in the health insurance industry, so many of these rates were obviously wrong as soon as I saw them.
- runako 15y ago
  >> Disclaimer: I work in the health insurance industry... Recommendation: Get your employer to build this and not the stuff that's on most health insurance sites. Note especially that you don't have to enter your name or email to get a rate and plan information. Kudos to you if your company has already done this!
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Just know that without considerably more information than your name, you're not getting a real rate anyways.
    - runako 15y ago
      Obviously. But even after submitting a completed application, I still don't have a real rate until the carrier completes underwriting/medical records check etc. We're talking about the first 10 minutes of the process here.
- gurgeous 15y ago
  My family rates assume one 10 year old child and spouses that are the same age. Could that be the problem? I tried to add disclaimers to that effect. Maybe I need to make them more prominent. Certainly the rates match up quite well during my testing.
cHalgan 15y ago
Excellent site. On general note, this site really emphasizes how fucked up is health system in US. There is complete lack of correlation how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get. There should be version: WhyHealthInsuranceinUSSucks.com
- _delirium 15y ago
  In part that's because, unfortunately, there is not that great a correlation between these advertised rates and how much they'll charge you once you actually go through the application process and have them pull your medical records, either.
jkeel 15y ago
Nice work and very useful! It's great to see the Twitter Bootstrap CSS being used as well. I've been using it as a starting point for my projects now. Maybe a next step would be for users to be able to save their plan name/type and then they can come back for comparisons. If you do that they maybe allow people to opt in for emails if a similar plan comes up as their saved plan but has a lower cost. Keep up the good work.
golfstrom 15y ago
HHS operates a really good site to find public and private insurance options: http://finder.healthcare.gov/ http://finder.healthcare.gov/
5teev 15y ago
Could you have the insurance companies' names in plain text? I could not locate "Aetna" using my browser's Find… function, but instead had to scan the "Company" column. I appreciate that it's sortable, but I might want to sort by price, then jump to each row using "Find Again" to see the variety offered by a particular company.
parfe 15y ago
Looks like your price sorting is by string and not integer so $1,491 (most expensive) then $199 (least expensive) were the top two results after sorting.
- BrandonM 15y ago
  Also, it would be nice if you could use stable sort (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_sort#Stability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_sort#Stability). This would allow to sort first by premium, then by deductible, then by insurance. This would allow me to see the $0/0% plans by increasing price.
- gurgeous 15y ago
  Fixed, thanks! jQuery Tablesort has a bug with currencies and commas...
pbreit 15y ago
Nit: the sort by premium should be a numeric sort so that 1,000 is greater than 999.
jeiting 15y ago
Great work, this is a great piece of tech that does some real good. Keep up the work!
tptacek 15y ago
This is very pretty and I'm sure it's to some extent useful. However, I also find it misleading. As someone who has been through the process of buying private insurance before: there are a number of sites like this (though none of them as elegant and spare). All of them will give you comparative rate charts. But those rates don't mean anything. After you select a provider, you have to fill out their application, which is onerous. They then do whatever record pulling they do in their backend and come back to you with an answer, which you can expect to take the form of "we can insure two of you for $JACKED_RATE, and we can't insure the other two at all", at which point you get to spend weeks in their appeals process figuring out which 15 minute doctor visit from 4 years ago put your wife or daughter on a "do-not-cover" list. I'm not just complaining about the (horrible) US insurance system here. I'm saying that sites like this don't work. No web developer has access to the real information this app purports to have, which is "what can I expect to pay for coverage from providers in my area". Note also that there are plenty of agents who will do this kind of legwork for you; they're often compensated by affiliate fees from insurers. (For what it's worth, the identical problem exists with comparative car insurance shopping; you can get rate charts all over the Internet, but it's not until you fill out the application for a specific provider and wait a week that you'll find out how much higher your rate is than the advertised minimum.) What would be very valuable would be a crowdsourced version of these charts.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > What would be very valuable would be a crowdsourced version of these charts. Could not agree more with your post, and the item quoted above in particular. (My own case: I'm as healthy as an ox, wife has inflammatory arthritis, which makes the application look like a book. When everything is done, you can be sure that we end up paying $JACKED_RATE*$MYSTERY_FACTOR.)
  - tptacek 15y ago
    My daughter had what we're pretty sure was a drug reaction seizure when she was 4. Uninsurable. You can also expect that any woman with any reproductive health issue, no matter how common, will be automatically declined for private health insurance, and will at best be able to obtain outrageously expensive last-resort insurance with a rider excluding huge swaths of her physiology. But these sound like simple gripes about how broken our insurance system is. That's not my point. My point is that the rates you get on a website like this have no bearing on the rates you'll actually be contractually promised, unless you are a healthy male in your 20s. I wonder if advertised rates like this are somehow based on average group coverage rates. It's completely whack, but, none of this stuff applies in group coverage. In group, you tell your provider "here's how many families, couples, and singles we have", and I think maybe the ages, and then you get a simple number for each category.
ricksta 15y ago
Is there a theme or framework that you used to make this site? It has the exact same UI as https://www.bitcoinica.com/ https://www.bitcoinica.com/
- gurgeous 15y ago
  Twitter Bootstrap - highly recommended!
  - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
    http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ for anyone who hasn't heard of it. It looks fantastic, and now I want to rewrite my current pet project templates to use this instead of what I already have...
orblivion 15y ago
I don't see BCBS in my results, and I have a BCBS plan.
AlexC04 15y ago
Under "Plan Types" you've used a checkbox when the actual behavior is a radio button. Plan Types HMO (15) PPO (79) What was the reasoning behind that? Are there other options that aren't mutually exclusive that sometimes show up dynamically? Was it a visual choice? The checkboxes underneath act like checkboxes. If it's a visual choice, why not use some actual style? http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ (see "buttons")
amritsharma 15y ago
I like what you've done with it so far!! I love your launch page UI, it's very clear and obvious what I am supposed to do. Good luck!
chollida1 15y ago
I've either broke it with my postal code or this website isn't supported in Canada. I'm guessing it's the latter.
Sindrome 15y ago
I work for a company that makes millions a year providing health care plan comparison sites to major plan carriers. I hate it because the industry is years behind. 90% of our clients demand IE6 support because their companies still use them. We constantly have to integrate with legacy systems and people don't understand how to consume our web services. It's very stable, but boring.... It's a bad place. Nice to see competent tech people getting into the market. I wouldn't mind starting/joining a health startup but I signed a pretty damning non-compete.
SeanLuke 15y ago
A really important factor is reputation. Some of the firms you have listed at the top of the list for me are cheap but have jet-black records.
ComputerGuru 15y ago
Your site lists the same companies as every other site out there - the problem is, it's missing so many other companies out there. It's basically a list of the same four or five companies over and over and over again with different plans. Where are all my local companies? Where's BlueCross BlueShield?
patja 15y ago
It gives me an inaccurate rate and just sends me to ehealthinsurance.com where they ask for just a tiny bit more info (ages of all enrollees) and gives me a different, more accurate rate. So why do I go to pickhealthinsurance.com again? All it does is give a wrong answer and refer me to a competitor (at least I am perceiving you as trying to compete with the likes of ehealthinsurance.com) who gives me a correct answer.
aklemm 15y ago
Someone mentioned the Mass. HealthConnecter. Here is another established tool the developer should know about: https://calpers2011.chooser2.pbgh.org/Default.aspx https://calpers2011.chooser2.pbgh.org/Default.aspx PickHealthInsurance looks nice and clean. Good job!
ffffruit 15y ago
Had some long discussions with colleagues about this and it just makes you wonder how "sophisticated" the algorithms behind health insurers are when the basic inputs are: postcode, smoker, age and gender.
waterside81 15y ago
As a software developer, I love this. You're doing exactly what this era of cheap technology has enabled us to do - aggregate information into a one easy to read, easy to understand interface. As others have mentioned, there's some fixes here & there, but you're definitely going down the right path. As a Canadian, I'm bewildered that this has to even exist.
lleger 15y ago
Well, for one, we're Parishes in Louisiana, not Counties, but that's mostly a pedantic thing. There's another site that I've seen that does something similar: http://www.prodigyhealthinsurance.com/ http://www.prodigyhealthinsurance.com/
Hisoka 15y ago
Everyone seems to comment on how great the UI looks, but it means nothing ultimately if the data is inaccurate.

232 points by gurgeous 15y ago

I'm releasing the first version of PickHealthInsurance today. It helps you compare health insurance plans (individual, not group) in the US. I put this together over a few weekends. My COBRA is about to run out and I found it exceptionally difficult to compare plans and prices with the existing sites. This is the third time I've had to buy individual insurance and I finally decided to do something about it. Things crystallized for me when I almost bought a plan that claimed to cover maternity, only to discover late in the game that it had a separate $20,000 maternity deductible! What a mess! I have a few goals with PickHealthInsurance: - start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions - explain confusing terms like "coinsurance" and point out the difference between a PPO and a POS. - show plan stats up front, not buried deep within the bowels of the application process - make it easy to use and blazingly fast Built with: - Rails 3.1 (HAML, Sass, Coffeescript) - Twitter Bootstrap CSS - Deployed on Heroku/MongoHQ What do you think?

charliepark 15y ago
This looks fantastic. Seriously, really good. I'd love to be able to specify the number of children I'd be putting on my plan (maybe not on that first page, but on an internal "refine" page?). Also, it'd be great to have checkboxes allowing me to select two or three plans, to then compare them head-to-head. But, again, this is an excellent first version. I look forward to seeing where it goes.
- lftl 15y ago
  I suppose some states may have different regulations effecting the system, but every plan I've ever seen doesn't differentiate based on the number of dependents you have. Rates are effectively tiered to single, married, or family.
  - noahnoahnoah 15y ago
    This varies significantly from state-to-state, by insurer, and even by plan. In places that do price based on actually composition for family plans, there's rarely a particularly linear correlation between family size and rates. (Also, good luck getting an insurer to tell you your actual rate on an online tool :/)
runako 15y ago
I really like it. I had to buy health insurance not too long ago, and I used one of the incumbent online services. The experience wasn't all that bad, but your site beats them in the first step of refining carriers/plans to see which ones I should consider. It also feels a lot more transparent. Also, I really like that it's fast. Don't lose that part. :-)
emp_ 15y ago
What is your take on the Twitter Bootstrap (assuming you are not involved in its development) in terms of productivity?
- gurgeous 15y ago
  Twitter Bootstrap is completely awesome. I could never make it look this good on my own, especially with full browser testing.
ora600 15y ago
I love the explanation of terms. Highly useful. It also highlights the near complete lack of correlation between how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get.
marklubi 15y ago
Pretty nice but could really use another search option for a single parent with children.
PaulHoule 15y ago
The cheapest rate I see is more than three times what I'm paying for COBRA insurance. It's a better plan than the plan I'm on, but I know a lot of people make less than that much a month. Yikes!
dgallagher 15y ago
Very nice. It's EONS better than Massachusetts' health insurance website (https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ https://www.mahealthconnector.org/). Idea: Perhaps add columns so you can sort plans by co-pay for Doctor visits, ER visits, an prescriptions? Maybe hide those columns by default so the GUI doesn't get too cluttered, but let users display them if desired.
- gurgeous 15y ago
  I'm trying not to clutter the UI. Ethan (my co-founder from Urbanspoon) came up with the idea for the "office visit" icon. I used to have that in a column and it was just too much, even on my enormous monitor.
tednaleid 15y ago
Looks nice, I like the clean presentation, much easier to use than eHealthInsurance, or going to the individual carrier's websites (if you even know who they all are). My startup, Bloom Health (http://gobloomhealth.com http://gobloomhealth.com) is in a similar space, but where you're going directly to consumer's who are shopping for their own health insurance (B2C), we're a B2B2C model, we work with employers and provide health insurance choices to their employees. We work within the employer system by changing from the existing defined benefit health insurance model (where employees get health insurance as a benefit for working for their employer) to a defined contribution model (where employees get a set amount of pre-tax money from their employer to spend however they want, including health/dental/HSA/etc.
duncanj 15y ago
I think it needs sliders to adjust the deductible, coinsurance, etc.
- gurgeous 15y ago
  More like kayak? I thought about adding the sliders, but it feels like the filtering is sufficient.
  - duncanj 15y ago
    well, when I sort on deductible, I have to mentally categorize all of the prices based on the other features even though I know I am not going to accept, say, 30% coinsurance. If I could max the deductible at x and the coinsurance at y then I could sort by price.
separated 15y ago
Have you heard of finder.healthcare.gov? It provides more detailed information with a few basic questions. It also provides a range of premiums per hit, and most important (in my opinion) gives feedback on how likely one is to actually land the quoted premium. The site was built by HHS, which had access to information provided by the insurance companies themselves on their acceptance rates, etc. I'm not sure why the insurance companies agreed to provide that sort of information, nor whether that information was made available to the public at large.
MJR 15y ago
- start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions Your core problem is going to be that approximate rates are based on answers to questions. The fewer questions you answer the less accurate your rate will be. Go talk to a few agents and let them draw out the benefits for you, they are free to you and they exist for this very purpose!
- xtracto 15y ago
  Why not add some kind of price range instead of a point price?.
pnathan 15y ago
Honestly, this is amazing. The big qualifier is, "YMMV", depending on medical history. If you could parlay some deals with the insurance companies related to being an "authorized reseller" where you could input Medical History and come out with a Comparative List that you could sign up for.... you'd be sitting pretty. IMO.
zeraholladay 15y ago
Thanks, you're awesome! This was exactly what I needed. I'm switching jobs and receiving a monthly figure to buy insurance. It's very easy to use, looks clean and PDQ. Great work.
neovive 15y ago
Looks great and definitely fills a great need. Definitely consider a side-by-side comparison option for the plans. BTW: Twitter Bootstrap looks like a great base template. I'm surprised I have never seen it before.

gdhillon 15y ago

Looks great, Clean UI and fast. Give option to compare plans side by side.

savrajsingh 15y ago

Great job, much easier than ehealthisurance.com when I used it a couple years ago.

dmillar 15y ago

Very interesting. Where is your data coming from?

ck2 15y ago

FYI your stylesheet is being served with html at the end (an error page) which is causing it to fail.

natbro 15y ago

sweet! serendipitously just what i need this week picking insurance and all the information more quickly and better organized than sites like ehealthinsurance.com et al. wants: - side-by-side comparison (check several, show all) - easy print-out of plans and side-by-sides, or PDF-gen - tool-tips for filters at left. nice tool-tips on terms in rows already - filter by deductible, co-pay, premium amnts (eg <$500)?

chadkeck 15y ago

Very nice! Your sorting by deductible doesn't work correctly.

bartman 15y ago

Great site, I especially like the explanations for the different terms. How did you get all the insurance rates and terms, just from the companies' sites? When I tried evaluating the health care plans my company offered me a few month ago I had a terribly hard time getting information about the different plans that are out there. (But then again, I'm not from the US and the whole health care system keeps confusing me.)

stcorbett 15y ago

It would be cool if I could see my existing plan on there and be able to compare apples to apples. They keep raising my premium, it would be nice to know if there was something else out there that had a lower premium.

MatthewB 15y ago

Cool site, needs some visual work but the idea is there. I have the same question as other people - how are you pulling this data? One thing you definitely need on the front page is gender selection. Gender instantly changes the price of insurance significantly and is a simple binary question. I hate dealing with health insurance so much so I very much hope this site evolves and becomes a success for you. Well done. Edit: Now you need to monetize this. The obvious way to do that is to do lead gen if they offer it.

pbreit 15y ago
I'm curious what "visual work" you feel is necessary? I quite like the simple and clear visual design and wish more web sites would do the same.

stcorbett 15y ago

Have you used an agent before? Their whole business is about helping individuals and businesses pick plans. My agent has shown me some good data sheets that get close to giving you apples to apples comparisons. I bet you could borrow a lot from their business models.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

I hope this is your full time gig. Picking a health insurance is one of the hardest problems ever. I do not know the business and I fear I am going to get screwed. If I had launched such a nice service I would try to charge the end user. I would be willing to pay money to an independent third party.

marquis 15y ago

This is timely - we were just looking for this an hour ago and wondering why it didn't exist! Thanks HN.

rglover 15y ago

Considering I'm currently without health insurance, this is extremely helpful. Love how simple the interface is and how it gives you an easy to understand list of providers. Excellent work.

Robin_Message 15y ago

Sorting by price sorts alphabetically, not numerically. I put in some details from when I was living in the US and I'm shocked—I can't find a plan that isn't 50% copay on brand name drugs?

faramarz 15y ago

Can't you claim a commission much like how brokers work? ..and if so, I wonder how you would do that. or, just become broker yourself and keep the leads, then pass them off to the Insurance company with leveraged commissions. Very cool site.

danielparks 15y ago

Very nice. I just went through the process of picking a health insurance plan using ehealthinsurance.com, and it was a bit of a pain. The one thing that would have made things a lot easier for me is being able to sort by out-of-pocket maximum. I wanted a high-deductible, HSA-compatible plan, and so having a low out of pocket maximum was my number one criteria. I wonder how many people actually know what they want in a health insurance plan? There are a huge number of options, and it's hard to know what's important. The guidance I found on the web tended to be generic, rather than targeted at the type of plan I wanted (major medical). Perhaps you could outline a few broad plan types, explain the advantages, and allow users to pick one? For example, I would have picked a "major medical plan", and it would have shown me plans that have solid out-of-pocket maximums that aren't much higher than the deductible. The data displayed for each plan would highlight differences between those plans (e.g. HSA-eligible) that might not be so important to a another plan type (e.g. full service plans).

jessevondoom 15y ago

This is incredibly helpful. I run a small OSS/music nonprofit and as you'd imagine there's not a lot of money in that. Having just gone through the process of looking around for insurance for my family I can say that is was an amazing contrast to the overwhelming and unpleasant experience of using insurance provider sites. I'm notoriously cheap, but would happily shell out a commission or even a one time fee for the service — keep it this simple and straightforward and you'll not only have a compelling business but a tool that really helps people.

rmason 15y ago

Great idea! But you need at a minimum to add one more question: desired deductible. I ended up with 79 plans and that is a bit much to sort through. Perhaps you could have a slider on the results that let you manually set the minimum deductible. Also I assume the charge listed was monthly but you didn't state that.

cedsav 15y ago

Looks great, but returns 0 plan that includes maternity coverage in my area. I don't know if it's an issue with the app, or just the sad state of health insurance in the US... probably a bit of both.

megamark16 15y ago
I found 6 plans with maternity coverage in my area (Kansas City). I'm sure they all have 2 year waiting periods, but that's not gurgeous' fault :-)
gurgeous 15y ago
Not a bug, sadly. That's just the way it is in some spots. We're lucky up here in Seattle.

fludlight 15y ago

Very cool. I wish I had this when shopping for insurance a year ago. A "total annual cost" column would be helpful for making sense of the deductible/premium/co-pay relationship. Think of it as the "Price+Shipping+Tax" on shopping websites. Ask the user how much he expects his doctors to charge him ("Annual Medical Bill") in the next twelve months, then calculate how much he would pay to the doctors and to the insurance company. Last time I bought health insurance I had to make a spreadsheet to calculate this. I would rather not repeat that mundane task again. It might also be useful to have multiple predefined Annual Med Bills ($0, $1,000, $5,000, $20,000, etc). Displaying the output on a graph might make sense (AnnMedBill vs TotalAnnCost, with a curve for each plan). You should customize these to the user's age (a 23 year old may not go to the doctor for years at a time, but even a healthy 50yo will definitely go several times per year for checkups and *oscopies). Mapping costs to life events (no doctor visits, a few visits, broken arm, healthy pregnancy, etc) would make it even more useful, but researching the necessary assumptions will take considerable work so just implement predefined dollar amounts as a version 1. Keep up the good work, this idea has value!

gurgeous 15y ago
I've toyed with adding some elaborate calculators. Last time I went through this exercise I built a rube-goldberg spreadsheet that let me plug in doctor's visits, major illness, deductible, premium, etc. and spat out a yearly number. It was just too complicated, though. Most people don't even understand what "coinsurance" is. I might add some pretty calculators later if the site gets some traffic.
- fludlight 15y ago
  >> Most people don't even understand what "coinsurance" is. That's exactly why you should add a calculator, so people can see how the variables interact.

randomguy33 15y ago

The rates your app returned were vastly different than running the same rate on numerous carrier websites. Your site showed rates that were sometimes less than half what the carrier site reported. How do you generate your rates? Your math seems dangerously wrong in a lot of places, especially when requesting family rates. (This is verifiable by running a rate on this website, and then going to one of the carriers websites and generating the same quote) Disclaimer: I work in the health insurance industry, so many of these rates were obviously wrong as soon as I saw them.

runako 15y ago
>> Disclaimer: I work in the health insurance industry... Recommendation: Get your employer to build this and not the stuff that's on most health insurance sites. Note especially that you don't have to enter your name or email to get a rate and plan information. Kudos to you if your company has already done this!
- tptacek 15y ago
  Just know that without considerably more information than your name, you're not getting a real rate anyways.
  - runako 15y ago
    Obviously. But even after submitting a completed application, I still don't have a real rate until the carrier completes underwriting/medical records check etc. We're talking about the first 10 minutes of the process here.
gurgeous 15y ago
My family rates assume one 10 year old child and spouses that are the same age. Could that be the problem? I tried to add disclaimers to that effect. Maybe I need to make them more prominent. Certainly the rates match up quite well during my testing.

cHalgan 15y ago

Excellent site. On general note, this site really emphasizes how fucked up is health system in US. There is complete lack of correlation how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get. There should be version: WhyHealthInsuranceinUSSucks.com

_delirium 15y ago
In part that's because, unfortunately, there is not that great a correlation between these advertised rates and how much they'll charge you once you actually go through the application process and have them pull your medical records, either.

jkeel 15y ago

Nice work and very useful! It's great to see the Twitter Bootstrap CSS being used as well. I've been using it as a starting point for my projects now. Maybe a next step would be for users to be able to save their plan name/type and then they can come back for comparisons. If you do that they maybe allow people to opt in for emails if a similar plan comes up as their saved plan but has a lower cost. Keep up the good work.

golfstrom 15y ago

HHS operates a really good site to find public and private insurance options: http://finder.healthcare.gov/ http://finder.healthcare.gov/

5teev 15y ago

Could you have the insurance companies' names in plain text? I could not locate "Aetna" using my browser's Find… function, but instead had to scan the "Company" column. I appreciate that it's sortable, but I might want to sort by price, then jump to each row using "Find Again" to see the variety offered by a particular company.

parfe 15y ago

Looks like your price sorting is by string and not integer so $1,491 (most expensive) then $199 (least expensive) were the top two results after sorting.

BrandonM 15y ago
Also, it would be nice if you could use stable sort (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_sort#Stability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_sort#Stability). This would allow to sort first by premium, then by deductible, then by insurance. This would allow me to see the $0/0% plans by increasing price.
gurgeous 15y ago
Fixed, thanks! jQuery Tablesort has a bug with currencies and commas...

pbreit 15y ago

Nit: the sort by premium should be a numeric sort so that 1,000 is greater than 999.

jeiting 15y ago

Great work, this is a great piece of tech that does some real good. Keep up the work!

tptacek 15y ago

This is very pretty and I'm sure it's to some extent useful. However, I also find it misleading. As someone who has been through the process of buying private insurance before: there are a number of sites like this (though none of them as elegant and spare). All of them will give you comparative rate charts. But those rates don't mean anything. After you select a provider, you have to fill out their application, which is onerous. They then do whatever record pulling they do in their backend and come back to you with an answer, which you can expect to take the form of "we can insure two of you for $JACKED_RATE, and we can't insure the other two at all", at which point you get to spend weeks in their appeals process figuring out which 15 minute doctor visit from 4 years ago put your wife or daughter on a "do-not-cover" list. I'm not just complaining about the (horrible) US insurance system here. I'm saying that sites like this don't work. No web developer has access to the real information this app purports to have, which is "what can I expect to pay for coverage from providers in my area". Note also that there are plenty of agents who will do this kind of legwork for you; they're often compensated by affiliate fees from insurers. (For what it's worth, the identical problem exists with comparative car insurance shopping; you can get rate charts all over the Internet, but it's not until you fill out the application for a specific provider and wait a week that you'll find out how much higher your rate is than the advertised minimum.) What would be very valuable would be a crowdsourced version of these charts.

jpdoctor 15y ago
> What would be very valuable would be a crowdsourced version of these charts. Could not agree more with your post, and the item quoted above in particular. (My own case: I'm as healthy as an ox, wife has inflammatory arthritis, which makes the application look like a book. When everything is done, you can be sure that we end up paying $JACKED_RATE*$MYSTERY_FACTOR.)
- tptacek 15y ago
  My daughter had what we're pretty sure was a drug reaction seizure when she was 4. Uninsurable. You can also expect that any woman with any reproductive health issue, no matter how common, will be automatically declined for private health insurance, and will at best be able to obtain outrageously expensive last-resort insurance with a rider excluding huge swaths of her physiology. But these sound like simple gripes about how broken our insurance system is. That's not my point. My point is that the rates you get on a website like this have no bearing on the rates you'll actually be contractually promised, unless you are a healthy male in your 20s. I wonder if advertised rates like this are somehow based on average group coverage rates. It's completely whack, but, none of this stuff applies in group coverage. In group, you tell your provider "here's how many families, couples, and singles we have", and I think maybe the ages, and then you get a simple number for each category.

ricksta 15y ago

Is there a theme or framework that you used to make this site? It has the exact same UI as https://www.bitcoinica.com/ https://www.bitcoinica.com/

gurgeous 15y ago
Twitter Bootstrap - highly recommended!
- nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
  http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ for anyone who hasn't heard of it. It looks fantastic, and now I want to rewrite my current pet project templates to use this instead of what I already have...

orblivion 15y ago

I don't see BCBS in my results, and I have a BCBS plan.

AlexC04 15y ago

Under "Plan Types" you've used a checkbox when the actual behavior is a radio button. Plan Types HMO (15) PPO (79) What was the reasoning behind that? Are there other options that aren't mutually exclusive that sometimes show up dynamically? Was it a visual choice? The checkboxes underneath act like checkboxes. If it's a visual choice, why not use some actual style? http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ (see "buttons")

amritsharma 15y ago

I like what you've done with it so far!! I love your launch page UI, it's very clear and obvious what I am supposed to do. Good luck!

chollida1 15y ago

I've either broke it with my postal code or this website isn't supported in Canada. I'm guessing it's the latter.

Sindrome 15y ago

I work for a company that makes millions a year providing health care plan comparison sites to major plan carriers. I hate it because the industry is years behind. 90% of our clients demand IE6 support because their companies still use them. We constantly have to integrate with legacy systems and people don't understand how to consume our web services. It's very stable, but boring.... It's a bad place. Nice to see competent tech people getting into the market. I wouldn't mind starting/joining a health startup but I signed a pretty damning non-compete.

SeanLuke 15y ago

A really important factor is reputation. Some of the firms you have listed at the top of the list for me are cheap but have jet-black records.

ComputerGuru 15y ago

Your site lists the same companies as every other site out there - the problem is, it's missing so many other companies out there. It's basically a list of the same four or five companies over and over and over again with different plans. Where are all my local companies? Where's BlueCross BlueShield?

patja 15y ago

It gives me an inaccurate rate and just sends me to ehealthinsurance.com where they ask for just a tiny bit more info (ages of all enrollees) and gives me a different, more accurate rate. So why do I go to pickhealthinsurance.com again? All it does is give a wrong answer and refer me to a competitor (at least I am perceiving you as trying to compete with the likes of ehealthinsurance.com) who gives me a correct answer.

aklemm 15y ago

Someone mentioned the Mass. HealthConnecter. Here is another established tool the developer should know about: https://calpers2011.chooser2.pbgh.org/Default.aspx https://calpers2011.chooser2.pbgh.org/Default.aspx PickHealthInsurance looks nice and clean. Good job!

ffffruit 15y ago

Had some long discussions with colleagues about this and it just makes you wonder how "sophisticated" the algorithms behind health insurers are when the basic inputs are: postcode, smoker, age and gender.

waterside81 15y ago

As a software developer, I love this. You're doing exactly what this era of cheap technology has enabled us to do - aggregate information into a one easy to read, easy to understand interface. As others have mentioned, there's some fixes here & there, but you're definitely going down the right path. As a Canadian, I'm bewildered that this has to even exist.

lleger 15y ago

Well, for one, we're Parishes in Louisiana, not Counties, but that's mostly a pedantic thing. There's another site that I've seen that does something similar: http://www.prodigyhealthinsurance.com/ http://www.prodigyhealthinsurance.com/

Hisoka 15y ago

Everyone seems to comment on how great the UI looks, but it means nothing ultimately if the data is inaccurate.