Brave to do a startup when many are agitating to completely get rid of for profit health insurance in the US.
Especially when working in a very regulated field. Who knows if ICHRA will last, maybe the next administration will scrap it. Kinda like how under Obama they had the individual mandate but Trump ended it. However some states have added an individual mandate for state residents since the federal one was eliminated, like MA, NJ, VT, CA, RI and DC. But there's still going through the courts as this whole individual mandate thing might have been unconstitutional in the first place, so those states might end up dropping them at some point again.
Plus I know there's SaaS apps to handle payroll and some of them integrate health care options. Seems like people don't like messing with this sort of stuff, will buy an option they think is safe and easy to handle and move on to their actual product unless they hired HR people with experience in this area who can be dedicated to managing this stuff. Seems like when it comes to some of these tasks of running a startup, you need some adult supervision. Might be a good programmer but all the ins and outs this and related stuff can be a huge distraction.
I guess since they had a background in HR and stuff doing a startup like this would be a bit easier than say me trying to do this...
Then another big thing even if you have insurance, who knows if you end up actually using it for anything if something won't be covered and then you get a big surprised bill. I feel like the whole in-network and out of network thing is the biggest scams. Say you looked on Google for the best Doctor, Dentist, specialist, etc and found one you liked you got to check the book they send you to see who's covered. Then another thing is a hospital can be in network, but someone like the anesthesiologist is out of network. Then remember seeing someone got charged $10 for an individually wrapped cough drop, when you could of just bought an entire bag at the local pharmacy.
So seem's like picking a plan out of some options sounds better though.
Also wonder since the advice with employees if someone quits, they say disable all accounts. Wonder if companies still have like a separate account for HR since don't some companies offer a web portal for insurance, probably also COBRA would be in that portal. However some companies this is all pen and paper but digitizing things something to think about... Like someone I know that worked at a factory, all this stuff was a packet you'd fill out with pen and paper and turn it in to someone in the office area. But I'd imagine tech companies would want to digitize a lot of this, and for remote teams that makes even more sense.
To your point on employees quitting - one of the benefits of Savvy is that if you change jobs, your insurance can stay with you as it is no longer tied to your employer.
Sounds like other businesses are built around specific regulations too, like tax software so I guess it's probably common and adds value since not everyone reads or understands everything, and a ton of this sort of stuff is probably easy to screw up if you try and do it on your own without the right tools or people helping. So sounds like when things change they got to follow the news of new stuff, catch up and implement things.
However I'd think some of those software providers are used to changing things year to year. But also wouldn't surprise me if they have some sort of framework in place to make changes without rewriting code all the time. Sounds like a similar story with some of the big ERPs, seen a post on HN recently talking about how those can get messy too.
I guess similarly to if you build on top of Facebook or Apple though, things change when you don't own the platform but they seem to have much better APIs since (It seems a lot of gov stuff is still pen and paper), examples and documentation. Plus if you mess up your iPhone app, chances are they won't publish it and get delayed so less draconian.