Show HN: Therapy Price Comparison Tool

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a healthcare price comparison spreadsheet my partner and I created.

Last year, we were doing a startup that found people therapists. Funnily enough, we pivoted because prices were so high and we didn't to make a luxury product.

Over the past few weeks it's become clear to us that people in the US have to spend increasingly out-of-pocket on healthcare even with insurance. From 2007 to 2017, the percentage of adults with employer health insurance on high-deductible health plans rose from 15% to 43%. For 2020, a high-deductible health plan is defined as one with a deductible greater than $1,400. Providers in certain fields, like therapy, also increasingly just don't take insurance. About 45% of psychiatrists don't take insurance, and in California about 50% of therapists don't take insurance.

Healthcare services prices are becoming very relevant, but we couldn't find a good price comparison tool. For example, I'm looking for a therapist myself, and I've narrowed my list down to 3 providers. The most expensive one is more than 200% of the least expensive one.

A couple of days ago we realized we actually have a decent amount of price data on therapists, so we decided to throw together this spreadsheet and see if it's useful for anyone.

We have about 120 verified prices that we confirmed over phone or email with therapists when we were finding people therapists. We also scraped prices for all the therapists in San Francisco from Psychology Today, the biggest therapist listing directory. (It's really easy to scrape them.) We also added any prices in bills we had access to, ours, friends', and family members'.

Note: you'll have to make a copy of the spreadsheet, and there's a tiny lag when using the dropdowns.

You can see a few interesting things. For example, we recommended the same therapists to multiple users and the prices were different. Prices also vary significantly from area to area.

We would love to make this more robust, so if you have any itemized bills for any healthcare service, not just therapy, we'd love to add them to this dataset! (Submission link in spreadsheet. We don't use your name, address, or contact information, so you can hide/remove any information like that.) We're also open to making it a web app.

Hopefully someone finds this interesting or useful! We'd love feedback, as well as if ya'll shared any of your experiences paying for healthcare out-of-pocket or any comparison tools y'all are aware of.