After much handwringing over the HealthCare.gov website, which has suffered technical glitches from its very first day, a team of three 20-somethings decided to build their own site to help Americans access information about health plans more easily.
Called HealthSherpa, the site allows users to enter their zip code to compare health plans. Entering your zip code, for example, would bring up exchange plans available in your area, which you would also find on the Health Insurance Marketplace on HealthCare.gov, or your local state exchange.
See also: Affordable Care Act Enrollment Is Worse Than First-Month Estimates
HealthSherpa also lets users filter by coverage options ranging from bronze, plans that covers 60% of expenses, to catastrophic, plans that only cover "all expenses beyond a high deductible." Another menu, called "subsidy," lets users enter household income and size to estimate if a user qualifies for subsidies that would help pay for a plan. If a user qualifies, the site prompts him or her to claim the subsidies through HealthCare.gov or a local state exchange.
Plagued from launch, the HealthCare.gov software encounters problems when total number of visitors reaches around 20,000 to 30,000 , an official who asked to remain anonymous told the Washington Post. The issues have made for a disastrous rollout in which many have not yet been able to sign up for the plans they will be required by law to have come 2014.
The Washington Post further reported that the site's problems may be too complex to be resolved by the end of November, as the White House had hoped.
The HealthSherpa team, made up of George Kalogeropoulos, 28, Ning Liang, 27, and Michael Wasser, 26, of San Francisco, told Mashable about their project to address this issue over email.
Liang and Kalogeropoulos manage a real estate startup site called RentMetrics, which helps users compare rent prices based on location and needs. Wasser runs a "healthcare software consultancy." The three started HealthSherpa after they tried to find out about their own health insurance options through HealthCare.gov. When they realized the website was experiencing difficulties, they created their own.
"Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through, and view available plans," the team said in an email.
The trio created a user interface to display data obtained from HealthCare.gov and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website. They also compiled information by reaching out to state exchanges "to get spreadsheets containing detailed premium information." Most importantly, they built an infrastructure strong enough to "handle thousands of concurrent visitors," they said. (A claim they repeated in a recent Facebook post, below.)
Post by The Health Sherpa.
"Several hundred thousand have visited the site since it was posted about a week ago," the team wrote. "We’ve heard from people of all ages and walks of life, and thousands of people have reached out to us directly via email, phone, and Twitter to thank us and to suggest features and request improvements."
The team stresses, however, that since it uses data from the HealthCare.gov website, it could not have created the site from scratch. At time of writing, the new site already had 33,871 Facebook likes on its 'about' page.
While you cannot purchase a plan directly on HealthSherpa, the site redirects you to the insurer you've chosen. "Tens of thousands of people have clicked through to buy a specific plan," the site developers said.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Image: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images