Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com

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).

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 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.

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!