Is there some terrible irony in the fact that purchasing health insurance can be an extremely painful process?
When Christine Carrillo and her co-founder Helen Lee listened to their friend gripe about his healthcare plan at a dinner party last year, the 14-year healthcare veteran decided to take a look at what his plan entailed.
“He had amazing insurance through his union and couldn’t figure out why it was so difficult to work with,” Carrillo said. “We’re experts and it took us six hours to put a crazy OCD spreadsheet together so we could actually compare what was going on. When we finished we realized that the plan he was on, although it seems like the best plan out there, doesn’t actually cover any of the medication he or his family takes or any physicians they visit.”
The duo revealed that their friend was paying $982 a month for a plan that didn’t fit his family’s needs and he was paying an extra $1,200 a month to see specialists and receive medication. They proposed a more suitable plan and saved him $9,000 a year.
With that, Impact Health was formed.
In order to create an unbiased, data driven health care marketplace, Carrillo and Lee stepped down from their leadership positions at Humanize Health (a healthcare consulting firm) and began building the site.
“People can’t get this information because it’s not readily available and you’d have to know what and where to look. We built a small product to test it out, starting with the algorithm to see if the results reaffirmed what we did with [our friend].”
While a traditional broker offers two or three coverage options, Impact Health seeks to provide every available option for any state and any health plan. Users can sign up for their coverage plan through the site in under five minutes and never have to bother with hellish insurance customer service lines — they’ll make the calls for you.
“What we’re seeing is that people just don’t trust health plans,” Carrillo said. “It’s not always because they don’t do what they say, but it comes down to the customer not being able to find the information quick enough and not being treated like a human being. People would rather scrub a toilet or go to the DMV than buy health insurance — it is just a painful experience.”
The LA-based company, currently working out of Techstars in New York, has flourished beneath the settling dust of 2010’s Affordable Care Act. As Carrillo explained, the federal statute has changed the way Americans view the health insurance marketplace:
“All of us need a massive change in how we look at this but that’s not going to happen until we treat this space as what it really is — this is consumer healthcare. People buy it. They pay for it whether it’s monetarily or with their time and we should be treated that way.”
The company has been working out of Techstars since September and is focused entirely on growing their user base. Upon completing the accelerator, they plan on returning to their Pasadena office.
