Show HN: Nora – AI that finds you the right health plan

[nliang86]

Healthcare.gov uses a list based shopping flow, with the typical user seeing 50 to 100 options, and lots of jargon. Most people end up enrolling over the phone through a broker or the HC.gov support line.

Nora is a health insurance expert that will ask you about your healthcare needs (doctors, drugs, conditions) and budget, estimate your subsidy, look through hundreds of options, and identify the best one for your scenario. Nora is patient - you can ask as many questions as you want, and she'll iterate on plan recommendations based on your feedback.

Nora uses the same plan, provider network and formulary data as Healthcare.gov.

Nora works in the 30 Healthcare.gov states, including FL, TX and NC. If there's interest, I can look at adding states that run their own marketplaces like CA.

Give it a try at https://norahelps.com

Would love to hear your feedback!

[neilsharma425]

The phone broker model exists largely because the plan comparison UI is genuinely unusable for most people, so there is a real problem here worth solving. Curious how you handle the subsidy estimation step. That calculation has a lot of edge cases around household composition, income fluctuations, and APTC reconciliation at tax time. Does Nora surface any caveats around that or does it give a single number? Also interested in how you handle network accuracy. Provider directories are notoriously stale and that is usually where people get burned after picking a plan based on whether their doctor is in-network.

[codingdave]

How difficult was it to get HIPAA compliant in order to ask for health info from consumers?

[nliang86]

Good question. HIPAA applies to covered entities (insurers, hospitals) and their business associates. We're neither - users are entering their information anonymously to do plan comparison. That said, we treat the data very carefully - we don't sell it, don't share it, and enrollment (where PII is collected) is on Healthcare.gov.