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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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)?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
99 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadI 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?
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.
Also, I really like that it's fast. Don't lose that part. :-)
It also highlights the near complete lack of correlation between how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
BTW: Twitter Bootstrap looks like a great base template. I'm surprised I have never seen it before.
- 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)?
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.)
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.
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.
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?
or,
just become broker yourself and keep the leads, then pass them off to the Insurance company with leveraged commissions.
Very cool site.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
That's exactly why you should add a calculator, so people can see how the variables interact.
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.
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!
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
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.
http://finder.healthcare.gov/