Comment by gurgeous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gurgeous | Hacker News Reader

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I'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 crystallized for me when I almost bought a plan that claimed to cover maternity, only to discover late in the game that it had a separate $20,000 maternity deductible! What a mess!

I have a few goals with PickHealthInsurance:

- start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions

- explain confusing terms like "coinsurance" and point out the difference between a PPO and a POS.

- show plan stats up front, not buried deep within the bowels of the application process

- make it easy to use and blazingly fast

Built with:

- Rails 3.1 (HAML, Sass, Coffeescript)

- Twitter Bootstrap CSS

- Deployed on Heroku/MongoHQ

What do you think?

This looks fantastic. Seriously, really good.

I'd love to be able to specify the number of children I'd be putting on my plan (maybe not on that first page, but on an internal "refine" page?).

Also, it'd be great to have checkboxes allowing me to select two or three plans, to then compare them head-to-head.

But, again, this is an excellent first version. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

I suppose some states may have different regulations effecting the system, but every plan I've ever seen doesn't differentiate based on the number of dependents you have. Rates are effectively tiered to single, married, or family.

This varies significantly from state-to-state, by insurer, and even by plan. In places that do price based on actually composition for family plans, there's rarely a particularly linear correlation between family size and rates. (Also, good luck getting an insurer to tell you your actual rate on an online tool :/)

I really like it. I had to buy health insurance not too long ago, and I used one of the incumbent online services. The experience wasn't all that bad, but your site beats them in the first step of refining carriers/plans to see which ones I should consider. It also feels a lot more transparent.

Also, I really like that it's fast. Don't lose that part. :-)

I love the explanation of terms. Highly useful.

It also highlights the near complete lack of correlation between how much a plan costs and how much benefits you get.

Looks nice, I like the clean presentation, much easier to use than eHealthInsurance, or going to the individual carrier's websites (if you even know who they all are).

My startup, Bloom Health (http://gobloomhealth.com) is in a similar space, but where you're going directly to consumer's who are shopping for their own health insurance (B2C), we're a B2B2C model, we work with employers and provide health insurance choices to their employees.

We work within the employer system by changing from the existing defined benefit health insurance model (where employees get health insurance as a benefit for working for their employer) to a defined contribution model (where employees get a set amount of pre-tax money from their employer to spend however they want, including health/dental/HSA/etc.

Pretty nice but could really use another search option for a single parent with children.

Have you heard of finder.healthcare.gov? It provides more detailed information with a few basic questions. It also provides a range of premiums per hit, and most important (in my opinion) gives feedback on how likely one is to actually land the quoted premium.

The site was built by HHS, which had access to information provided by the insurance companies themselves on their acceptance rates, etc. I'm not sure why the insurance companies agreed to provide that sort of information, nor whether that information was made available to the public at large.

The cheapest rate I see is more than three times what I'm paying for COBRA insurance. It's a better plan than the plan I'm on, but I know a lot of people make less than that much a month. Yikes!

Very nice. It's EONS better than Massachusetts' health insurance website (https://www.mahealthconnector.org/).

Idea: Perhaps add columns so you can sort plans by co-pay for Doctor visits, ER visits, an prescriptions? Maybe hide those columns by default so the GUI doesn't get too cluttered, but let users display them if desired.

I'm trying not to clutter the UI. Ethan (my co-founder from Urbanspoon) came up with the idea for the "office visit" icon. I used to have that in a column and it was just too much, even on my enormous monitor.

- start showing approximate rates almost immediately, don't pester me with a bunch of questions

Your core problem is going to be that approximate rates are based on answers to questions. The fewer questions you answer the less accurate your rate will be. Go talk to a few agents and let them draw out the benefits for you, they are free to you and they exist for this very purpose!

Why not add some kind of price range instead of a point price?.

Honestly, this is amazing. The big qualifier is, "YMMV", depending on medical history.

If you could parlay some deals with the insurance companies related to being an "authorized reseller" where you could input Medical History and come out with a Comparative List that you could sign up for.... you'd be sitting pretty. IMO.

What is your take on the Twitter Bootstrap (assuming you are not involved in its development) in terms of productivity?

Twitter Bootstrap is completely awesome. I could never make it look this good on my own, especially with full browser testing.

Looks great and definitely fills a great need. Definitely consider a side-by-side comparison option for the plans.

BTW: Twitter Bootstrap looks like a great base template. I'm surprised I have never seen it before.

Thanks, you're awesome! This was exactly what I needed. I'm switching jobs and receiving a monthly figure to buy insurance. It's very easy to use, looks clean and PDQ. Great work.

I think it needs sliders to adjust the deductible, coinsurance, etc.

More like kayak? I thought about adding the sliders, but it feels like the filtering is sufficient.

well, when I sort on deductible, I have to mentally categorize all of the prices based on the other features even though I know I am not going to accept, say, 30% coinsurance. If I could max the deductible at x and the coinsurance at y then I could sort by price.

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