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Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

pickhealthinsurance.com

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Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#71

Post by fludlight »

gurgeous wrote: post #62
fludlight wrote: post #29

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 insura…

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.

>> 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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#72

Post by noahnoahnoah »

tptacek wrote: post #44

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, whic…

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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#74

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

gurgeous wrote: post #63
ricksta wrote: post #51

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

Twitter Bootstrap - highly recommended!

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...

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#75

Post by jessedhillon »

tptacek wrote: post #49
jpdoctor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#76

Post by Sindrome »

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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#77

Post by runako »

tptacek wrote: post #47
runako wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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!

Just know that without considerably more information than your name, you're not getting a real rate anyways.

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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#79

Post by jpdoctor »

jessedhillon wrote: post #75
tptacek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

#80

Post by TruffleLabs »

tptacek wrote: post #44

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, whic…

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.

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