Comparing New Health Insurance Plans Made Easy

Call it HealthCare.gov lite.

HealthSherpa, the new website's real name, helps you sort through plans offered by the health insurance marketplace. You can't actually purchase a plan on HealthSherpa, but as its name suggests, it can be a helpful guide.

You simply answer a few key questions - your zip code, whether you smoke, what level of coverage you want - and boom, HealthSherpa delivers an important service that the website for the Affordable Care Act has infamously failed at. Some 85 percent of HealthSherpa's users complete the research process, NPR reports.

 

Atlantic Wire  raved: "The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare in 34 states. (They left out the 16 states with existing marketplace sites, though it seems support for those states is coming soon.) The result is a simple, beautiful, remarkably responsive website that anyone could use."

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It took three young programmers only three days to build the site, according to CBS News.

Independent health care consultant Shelley A. Francis told the New York Times that she found HealthCare.gov cumbersome, but HealthSherpa quickly helped her narrow her plan choices.

"When you want something done around I.T.," Francis added, "get the millennials to do it."

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