Cake Health Wants To Be The ‘Mint For Health Insurance’ (Beta Invites) | Hacker News Reader

Cake Health Wants To Be The ‘Mint For Health Insurance’ (Beta Invites)

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16 pointsjedwhite23 comments

Banks have spreadsheet level account information - debits, credits, categories and labels. Not a very broad set of information to parse. Most banks offered several common formats for this data and it was readily available online - albeit with some caveats. Health insurance on the other hand is nothing like that.

For example - Showing a BCBS logo is hardly representative of the 39 separate companies which are part of the BCBS Association. Good luck trying to wrangle connecting to each of these companies and then trying to decipher the individual plan-level benefits of thousands of customized plans at each specific insurer. Employer's routinely customize benefits for their employee offered plans. These benefits are detailed in your benefit booklet or member guide which you probably get by mail and maybe have access to in a PDF online. Parsing and then reporting on that info is a tall order and that's if you can even get access to it.

This is in addition to the legal hoops that you'll have to jump through to even explore the ramifications of transferring PHI(Personal Health Information) from insurers and storing it elsewhere. Once explored you have to get permission to acquire this information - another difficult hurdle if its even possible.

TLDR - They're in for a long climb up a very steep hill.

It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

Those are some very formidable challenges. Maybe they could start with the ability to compare plans to help you choose the correct (probably publicly available) plan.

This is a great point, and something we're definitely aware of. The short story is that we think it's worth the trouble to build something that provides this for the end user, and we've made some significant progress on that path already. As a shameless plug, if you're interested in helping us get there, we're hiring: cakehealth.com/jobs

Oh yeah - and I forgot to mention state health exchanges coming in 2014.

One question I'm really curious about - how do you plan to make money? Are you going to try to achieve agent/broker status? Sell ads to different insurers? Or just wait and see?

This is a space ripe for innovation. There is such a lack of transparency in healthcare pricing and what your insurer--if you have one--will actually cover on your behalf.

Anything that makes it easier for people to buy their own health insurance is a good thing. There's something about employers buying products for employees that makes those products tend towards crappiness (cf. enterprise software).

I have been to the doctor 2 times in 20 years, and managing something like this just seems like an unnecessary pain. I have catastrophic with a high deductible, and I don't care to even bother with the topic unless mandatory. This just isn't like managing one's finances.

Edit: To be clear, I manage the finances of 22 subcontractors and 3 general contractors. It's a very big deal. I don't manage their healthcare at all. Much like Microsoft's strategy in mobile, healthcare needs to be as maintenance free as possible.

Any family with kids is going to be in to the doctor many times per year. They need immunizations, they break bones, they get cavities that need to be filled, etc. Then as you get old, you're on heart medication, hyper tension medication, etc.

I'm a generally healthy 27 year old, and in the last two years I've had to get cavities filled, catch up on some immunizations required by my graduate school, get my contact prescription updated twice, etc.

I truly appreciate your response, and I realize it is quite common. However, you'll have to forgive me if I consider you "needy" because I come from the minimalist mindset. I once broke up with a girl I thought I might marry because she turned out to be allergic to bees. I spend far to much time in the back-country to be attached to someone so vulnerable. I am trying to give my true opinion, and I don't think I've made any generalizations or poor logical assumptions, I've just shown how idiosyncratic I am about certain topics. I welcome opinions, and I love intelligent debate.

EDIT: Cool. Down-voting for disagreement is not supposed to be how this works[1], but you people can't help yourselves? Grow some balls and make an argument.

[1]http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you are trying to be part of the HN community and add value, why can't you state your reasons for disagreement?

All I see is down votes. Does anyone have logic to explain the reasoning or does only the fact that you disagree count?

This is not what I've come to believe the HN community is about.

P.S. The max neg number I have is -2 since you can't see the specifics.

Edit: Now (9:50 PM PST) neg 3, no logical response, however.

Perhaps the downvotes are because your answer really doesn't give a solution. Sending everyone you deem "weak" to a leper colony is not viable. You can't break-up with your child if they are ill with either a typical childhood illness or worse, a chronic condition like, for example a bee allergy, asthma, childhood cancer, celiac disease, crohn's disease, etc...

Your arguments throughout this thread aren't substantive because you're basically giving anecdotal evidence which is worthless.

The healthcare industry is enormous. It's a huge political issue in most developed nations. Currently health care spending is 16% of the United States GDP and that is projected to rise much faster than the rate of inflation[1].

You aren't helping yourself by taking an inflammatory and trollish tone. Do you go around to every other thread telling other people what doesn't matter to you as if that's all that matters? "Scala, I haven't programmed any Scala in 20 years, who cares about Scala? Only 8 comments? No surprise, retarded idea." That's pretty much what you sound like right now.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Health_care_i...

Well, perhaps it's not targeted towards you.

I was just looking at health plans last night, and for a family of four, it is a very complex issue. Different kinds of deductibles, whether Rx are covered, office visits, co-insurance, different caps, etc.

But I can understand that if you have no need for it, then YOU have no need for it, and I congratulate you that YOU have no need for it, and wish you the best in the future so that YOU never have a need for it.

Some of the rest of us? We have a need for it.

Thanks!

I didn't mean it like that, sorry if I offended you, but I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that many of the HN community don't have any family to worry about because to be an entrepreneur and a family man, to me, sounds impossible. I made a deal with myself at 20 not to have kids until I have saved $1M. Over 35 and still not there yet. YMMV.

I will be at the wynkoop brewery in denver with a black hooded sweatshirt on May 14 b/w 4 and 6pm (playing pool upstairs), and it would be helpful if you could tell me where i went wrong in anything i wrote.

If I show up, are we going to "take it outside?"

EDIT: Sorry, I'm being just as bad as the post I'm responding to; I don't mean to troll. Let me explain where I think you went wrong.

You claimed (at least certainly implied) that this was not a worthwhile idea because health insurance isn't really necessary or is not for the majority of people; which one you meant wasn't totally clear. Either way: kids and women comprise a lot of the US population. Kids need health insurance. Women, also, usually need health insurance if they are sexually active (though this isn't always true).

Genetic diseases, mental disorders, accidents, etc. Lots of reasons to have health insurance.

Next point: Health insurance is complicated. It shouldn't be. When I left my job, finding individual health insurance was incredibly painful, and I have excellent credit and no predisposition to disease (and no existing ones). I can't even imagine how hard it would be if either of those weren't true.

So I think you went wrong in that you were short-sighted; just because it doesn't apply to _you_ doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile or useful idea.

Lots of people can't drive, but somehow the rental car business is still booming.

If you're not trolling (and I'm not sure you're not), a bit of friendly advice.

Girls have biological clocks.

The girls your age - their clocks started ticking as soon as you start growing stubble, and they stop ticking, oh, between 5 and 15 years from now. Once that clock is done, you're not having kids with them, no matter how filthy rich you've become.

The way I see it, if you're at all serious about having kids, you have two options:

a) Freeze some of your boys just in case things get wonky in your old age. (No, seriously, you should do this.) Then, be aware that the longer it takes you to hit that big jackpot, the bigger that jackpot will have to be to attract a girl so much younger than you that she can have your kid.

b) Have a kid now, and don't sweat all of this stuff so much.

It's not really any of my business, but you can guess which one I think is more likely to make you (or at least me, in your shoes) happy.

Carriers have different systems for group and individual insurance. And they have various constraints when they offer plans to groups. And that's what a typical carrier's underwriting system does. It would be interesting to see how this recommendation system would work with employer/group plans.

A hard problem but yeah if you can solve it then it'll help out a lot of people.

That's what I thought, minimal interest on HN. 8 points? Only unhealthy people care, and they clearly have no arguments or they would make them, since it is easy to do here on this forum.

EDIT: Nice rebuttal: down vote. You are part of the HN plague.

Simply down-voting without an argument doesn't strengthen your position. It makes you seem without argument.

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