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.
Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
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Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#42Nit: the sort by premium should be a numeric sort so that 1,000 is greater than 999.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#43Great work, this is a great piece of tech that does some real good. Keep up the work!
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#44This 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.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#45Excellent 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
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.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#46Looks 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.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#47The 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 web…
>> 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.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#48This 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…
> 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.)
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#49This 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…
> 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.
Re: Show HN: PickHealthInsurance.com
#50I'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 cr…
I think it needs sliders to adjust the deductible, coinsurance, etc.