Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

Insurance plans are complicated. To ensure the customer knows all his/her options and the differences between the plans requires some understanding and basic training.

If I flip your concern around, why do you think it would be appropriate for someone to sell me a health insurance plan without any understanding of what the different plans offer or which plan best served my needs?

If I'm buying insurance, I expect the salesperson to be able to understand my situation, what I'm looking for, and tell me all my available options, and the benefits/drawbacks of each.

Licensing makes sure the salesperson goes through the efforts to get to this point.

View on HN

> why do you think it would be appropriate for someone to sell me a health insurance plan without any understanding of what the different plans offer or which plan best served my needs

I signed up with Covered California a few months back and while they provided basic facts and a comparison matrix of plans, they didn't go out of their way to make sure it would fit my needs just perfectly. With nothing but a Web site and a wizard, how would they?

I expect the salesperson to be able to understand my situation, what I'm looking for, and tell me all my available options, and the benefits/drawbacks of each.

If so, it sounds like insurance salespeople are similar to tax or financial advisors, and regulation forces them to read through and familiarize themselves with all of the options. Fair enough. Just wish the system itself was revamped, pricing schemes simplified, and information made more accessible, to make even this unnecessary.

The other thing is that it gives the customer protection. Ie, customer has some sort of legal recourse (I think) if they've been mis-sold insurance from a salesperson, who was required to be licensed and show basic competency and ethics.

Thank Obama. That's one of the biggest benefits of the Obamacare exchange: when you look at a gold/silver/bronze plan, there's a legally enforced minimum level of benefits so you don't have to read a 20 page plan wondering what the gotcha is. You can still get bit by narrow vs wide networks, but it's an order of magnitude easier to comparison shop.

Don't worry still gotchas. Phone rep will say on vs off marketplace plans are the same. Phone rep and website say the doctors you want to use like your midwife are covered on marketplace plan. Then you give birth and insurance says the doctor is 100% covered but the room you gave birth in was 0% covered (despite it being the only room said doctor can give birth in), and you get a 13k bill from the hospital for having a baby despite having a "gold" insurance plan. Fuck you Anthem and the horse you rode in on. I hope you all choke on your breakfast.

Yeah, it was pretty easy to find that none of the plans on offer covered any of my preferred providers and all were more expensive than the open market coverage for me. However, getting the formularies for each plan and comparing them was very difficult.

> Just wish the system itself was revamped, pricing schemes simplified, and information made more accessible, to make even this unnecessary.

One mans bug is another mans profit. So that's not happening.

Except, anyone in America who doesn't get insurance through work has to assess all of the benefits/drawbacks of each plan without the help of a broker today. So the point is kind of moot. I think the bigger implications are that if I buy insurance, I can at least go into a database and look up to see if a broker is licensed. If a broker's information is stored in a database somewhere, it'd be much easier to seek out the bad actor for punitive damages. It also provides some fear on the broker side that if their information is stored somewhere that they are somewhat trackable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com