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Comment by unlinked_dll | Hacker News Reader

> For employees, we provide an in-app marketplace with access to every individual health plan, as well as vision and dental options. Employees can speak with licensed brokers every step of the way.

I really want to like you for taking a stab at solving this problem because it's a serious one for startups and small businesses, but I can't as long as you keep this approach. Shopping for insurance (even through a broker) is an extra layer of friction to the hiring/onboarding process and this needs to be removed.

In my experience, startups are bottlenecked by hiring more than anything today, and part of that is compensation/benefits. If you make it more difficult or more complex for startups to get people compensated and set up with benefits, they will decide to work somewhere else.

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What do you envision is the best way to do this? Our approach is to present employees with a few options upfront that, behind the scenes, have been recommended by a broker for them. They can speak with their broker if want help understanding and selecting one of the recommended plans, or look at the wider market if nothing suits them.

We try to streamline the experience as much as possible, and put in a lot of work building an interface that explains the plan details in-app.

And you always have the option to tell one of our brokers "None of these work for me, I want to make sure Dr. Smith is in my network, show me more options".

My guess is you would do it like most employers do, provide a small menu of options, have a default choice, and if you don't make a choice by a due date, enroll the employee in the default choice.

Having been a small business owner who has had to shop, I would have loved the "CostCo" quality model applied. I know that would be really difficult for a startup with the state of our healthcare, but to me it would mean getting in the largest insurance pool possible with above average customer friendly choices making it easy to say yes. That also implies a very few options to chose from, and maybe ideally one (that gets you to the larger pool).

BTW costco quality also doesn't mean the absolute highest quality, just above average solid options plus using the volume to drive the affordability.

Are you describing HMOs? You have fewer available plans in exchange for cost savings with a large pool.

Not specifically. HMOs are more bringing in the services together with the insurance function - larger pools than many small business plans may be a side effect. But "regular" insurance should also be able to create larger pools - indeed some states specifically form small business health insurance pools to help make that community get better healthcare plans.

Yeah seriously! My employer pays 100% for a blue shield PPO with no deductible and fantastic coverage. It’d be pretty tough to leave them for a more frugal employer haha.

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