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.
To offer a different perspective... I'm younger than you, and was shopping for individual insurance.
In my case, the hardest part was trying to compare plans from the companies in my area. All of them have slightly different ways of making it profitable for them. One could have Rx copays, but a special deductible for ER and urgent care visits. Another company may have only Rx reimbursement and office visit copays. So on and so forth. I actually had a spreadsheet with about a dozen columns to try to figure out, based on how I've used healthcare in the last few years, what plan is likely to be best for me.
Anything to simplify it would be great.
Moreover, the companies I've worked with on this, Blue Cross of Florida and United Healthcare (GoldenRule), in my own experience, the rates they quoted me online after filling out their survey were correct.
Healthcare costs and complexity surely go up as we all get older, so that, plus difference in state laws, probably explain the differences in value we see in this app.
Yeah, I'm currently insured by United and was previously insured by Blue Cross.
I think your point is correct that the site is a (now cliched?) "leaky abstraction." But the good news is that it works for at least some segment of the market (those like myself).
I was 25 when I did the Blue Cross app and 27 when I did United.
This is a cool idea, and a good first start implementation. It's also the basis of the "Health Insurance Exchanges" that are due to be set up by the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare in the pejorative).
Starting in 2014 individuals can buy insurance directly in an Affordable Insurance Exchange. An Exchange is intended to be a transparent and competitive insurance marketplace where individuals and small businesses can directly buy qualified health benefit plans.
Individual states are free to set up exchanges prior to the mandatory deadline, but with politics being what they are, that's not a guarantee of swift action. The details on implementation will be promulgated by Health and Human Services, most likely via the CFR and Federal Register, so we don't yet know how it will shake out in detail. But there's an overview PR-style here:
http://www.healthcare.gov/news/blog/health_insurance_exchang...
> 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.)
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.
Would it be worth it, or even possible, to find a few other families in similar situations and create a dummy corporation which "employs" all of your families? All of you could collectively pay for a share of the group premiums -- ironically, I think this is similar to how health insurance was originally intended to function.
In CA at least, there are rules about a regular salary going to the insured employee.
That said: If you have a startup paying you regularly, I believe there are non-exclusionary laws preventing the insurance company from excluding employees which makes it a good avenue to pursue. I know folks that structured buyouts so that they would continued to be employed (and paid) by a shell company simply to maintain insurance.
> You can also expect that any woman with any reproductive health issue, no matter how common, will be automatically declined for private health insurance
Not so fast. If she never goes "bare", she can't be denied for pre-existing conditions.
Is it really that hard for people who know that they have chronic conditions to act as if they have chronic conditions?
What do you mean, "goes bare"? My family has had continuous coverage since I get married, and both me and my wife had continuous coverage prior to that. Are you trying to say it's impossible to be denied coverage? You're wrong.
I'm not going to get into the severity of the "chronic conditions" we're talking about because they're none of your business, but based on prevalence in the population, it's crazy that they're auto-decline conditions.
This is exactly the problem. Despite spending what is in my many cases billions of dollars a year on IT and related underwriting systems, most of the major health insurers in the US still have some manual touch involved in their pricing, which means that they can't price in anything near real-time. Even the best can do perhaps half in a fully automatic way, yet generally choose not to do it in realtime (for reasons I'll never fully grasp).
One major insurer that I'm familiar with receives applications from the biggest of these sites by fax, on paper. They're then shipped to a low cost country, where they're scanned, and then passed along to another low cost country to have the OCR corrected. Then the work comes back on-shore to be manually adjudicated. Figure 3 days minimum, a week on average to get all of this done.
A crowd-sourced solution would be astronomically useful. For it to be accurate, you need to capture a decent amount of medical information (most insurers ask a pretty standard set of ~20 questions), but even knowing that the average person pays 1.4x the quoted rate for someone of their age/gender/zip would be a great tool.
I've been in your shoes and I empathize. In fact, I was in your shoes just a few days ago when I applied for insurance. The rates here are "representative" and I tried to add disclaimers in the obvious places. The rates are similar to what you see if you check with your state's insurance commissioner. Most states require the health insurance companies to publicly disclose those rates.
Of course, they can still mess with you and they won't hesitate to do so if they think they can't make money at this price. There's no way to find out the final rate without completing the entire application process. In that respect it's similar to auto insurance.
PickHealthInsurance still has a lot of utility compared to existing sites, though.
You can get often get the advertised rates, but not always. In Washington State for example, you can get these rates if you're running out of COBRA and you've been covered continuously. They aren't allowed to ask questions.
I don't think there's a magic bullet, unfortunately. Suggestions welcome.
Are you sure Washington State is that simple? I don't live there and only spent a few moments researching, but I don't see that WA has guaranteed issue with continuous coverage. It does seem to have guaranteed renewal, but that locks you into one insurer, doesn't it?
Here we have something called the Standard Health Questionnaire (SHQ), which they make you fill out when applying for insurance. But there are a bunch of exceptions at the top which make it possible to avoid submitting the SHQ. Running out of COBRA is one of those exceptions.
This is exactly how it worked for me when my COBRA coverage expired and I lived in WA. Bypassing the SHQ was key to getting reasonable rates for myself.
Washington is actually pretty good relative to any other state I've seen. If you avoid SHQ through previous coverage, especially post-Obama changes (getting rid of lifetime limits), buying health insurance IS fairly straightforward.
Agree: great start on possible plans in the area, but the leg work is in filling out the application (that can be tedious/long if you have any medical history), obtaining a real quote, and then comparing the plan details.
Another leg work item is understanding the plan details. While it is great to see initial set of plans, it is hard to compare plans (how does United Health "Saver 80" compare to the IHC Group "Freedom HDHP"?). Possible feature enhancement: provide me a table compare of the details.
Lastly, many of the details of picking a plan for families centers around the current health ecosystem: Is our pediatrician participating in the plan, what is really covered, and what is the track record of the insurance company paying claims. That deeper information, if offered early, could help in the search for a plan.
I develop for a company that does much of this. Electronic applications, plan comparisons, drug rates, etc. Also, you can phone in and have someone help you through the process. Is this more of what you would like so see?
Crowdsourcing health insurance is a really interesting idea.
Why shouldn't I, and many other people, open our medical records and insurance information? I.e. post it to some publicly accessible database, anonymously or not.
Could we get insurance providers to make us individuals/families offers, then, instead of us having to do the searching?
It may take some time before such a social/industrial shift occurs, if ever.
In the meantime, a bot that submits my info to various providers and gives me their actual quotes in sortable format could expedite choosing health care based on actual quotes, rather than the (usu. equal or lower) advertised rates.
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
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.
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 :/)
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. :-)
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) 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
- 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
>> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, it would be nice if you could use stable sort (see 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)?
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.