One feature touted in this year’s version of the HealthCare.gov health insurance marketplace website is a calculator to help consumers price compare plans.
Dan Harding figures he’s done them one, and maybe two or three, better.
Mr. Harding, an East End medical research coordinator, says he has developed a software-based algorithm that offers truer, more detailed method to make comparisons.
Where HealthCare.gov allows Web visitors to compare up to three marketplace plans at one time, Mr. Harding’s product, called HealthSage (healthsage.info), can pit an unlimited number of commercial plans against each other, including commercial and other plans not on the government website.
The Pennsylvania exchange offers 43 different plans.
HealthSage has only been marketed a few weeks, but Mr. Harding has already set his sights high: “We want to be the TurboTax of health insurance.”
The impetus for Mr. Harding’s project was personal — going into last year’s open enrollment period, his employer had offered 11 plans for him to choose from for his family of five.
“My thought was, whether it was two plans or five plans or 100 plans, I’ve got no idea how to compare the apples to apples.”
So he set up a spread sheet to compare plans, then developed an algorithm to show which plan worked best for him over a period of years based on the family’s expected costs factoring in the varying premium, deductible, co-insurance and co-payment figures.
In the end, he switched from an HMO to a Health Savings Account plan, a high-deductible plan that allows employees to accrue money for later needed medical care with unused funds rolled over at the end of the year. Now he’s contemplating changing plans again for 2016 based on the HealthSage calculations.
Mr. Harding calls HealthSage “a decision-making tool” that will help consumers make a more informed choice. But he cautions that it cannot predict what a family’s health costs will be any more than one can predict getting involved in an auto accident when deciding how much car insurance to buy.
“You have no idea how it’s actually going to play out, but the goal of HealthSage is to take the pain and frustration out of guessing.”
HealthSage does not list which providers are in-network for any specific plan, so when he changes plans, he has to contact the family’s physicians to make sure they accept the new plan.
But Mr. Harding is still convinced that HealthSage represents a marked improvement to what consumers have been offered previously.
“Using HealthCare.gov, or pamphlets from your employer, you’re just given these raw facts: ‘This is the deductible for Plan F.’ So you are only able to make apples to oranges comparisons. The special part of our tool is that it will show how they [the different plans] will act based on anticipated costs.”
HealthSage offers two products: for $8.99, a tool that allows the buyer to create a personal profile and compare as many health insurance plans as they’d like as well as create a personal profile; and for $49, personal concierge service including analysis of your options and 24/7 customer service.
The focus is on comparing commercial insurance offerings but Mr. Harding said it may be possible to compare Medicare plans.
He launched the site on Oct. 23 after testing it with a half-dozen friends and acquaintances. One who tried it, C. Prentiss Orr of East Liberty, had recently left a position to strike out on his own, so he needed to shop for insurance for his family, including a daughter now living in San Francisco.
The difference between using HealthSage and sorting through literature on multiple plans was striking, he said. “It was instant visualization more or less on a bar graph that gave you information that you needed to know visually without having to read the fine print.”
Mr. Harding has fewer than a dozen customers for the month-old HealthSage so, for now, the product is part hobby and part enterprise. He knows there are other companies and services trying to help people out.
Enroll America, a Washington, D.C., the independent nonprofit organization that has led the way nationally for helping the uninsured get health coverage, is launching its own website for comparing plans called Get Covered Plan America (www.enrollamerica.org/get-covered-america/get-covered-plan-explorer) and spokeswoman Julia Cusick said others have been developing similar sites to help people navigate the choices.
“We are definitely seeing that consumers are increasingly interested in understanding their total out-of-pocket costs when choosing a plan through the marketplace, that’s why tools like the Get Covered Plan Explorer and others are so helpful,” she said.
Mr. Harding believes he’s selling something different.
“We’ve found plenty of other ways to compare plans but we have yet to see anything that does it financially the way that we do,” he said. “What we want is for customers to be empowered so they feel like they have some control.”
Date: November 24, 2015