It's actually a mix - we are agent of record on a sizable portion, and we process enrollments for insurance companies and agents for the remainder.

Our main goal is to making signing up as easy as possible. Our currently flow is getting individuals through in about 5 minutes, and families in around 10. The revenue will allow us to build many more useful features.

>If this doesn't show that healthcare.gov (and every single other state-exchange) should never have been built in the first place, I don't know what does.

I am definitely stepping out on a limb here, but I would imagine HealthSherpa uses the HealthCare.org API and would not have a product offering without Healthcare.org having laid the ground work (i.e. consolidating the insurance plans available and offering the API).

You addressed 1 of the 2 major issues I have with the ACA. I think the issue you raised could simply be called transparency, but as you allude there is no reason when I click on a plan in any market place, that I should not be able to see an exhaustive list of the providers who accept the given plan and a list of providers who do not, aside from premiums I would imagine this is the single most important factor to the majority of consumers, and the most important for people who are not picking plans based on finances. There are other data points insurers should be made to disclose as well, such as: the total number of claims under a given plan, the number of claims that were paid/not paid out, and the average amount of time it took to approve/pay said claims.

The 2nd issue, none of these plans on the market place make healthcare affordable to those who were previously uninsured due to cost. Yes, there are subsidies for premiums, but once someone actually has to use the plan, most can not afford the out of pocket co-pay much less the deductible. Due to inability to truly afford their subsidized insurance plan, people avoid using their insurance and so all the mandate really seems to do is line the pockets of the insurers with subsidized premiums on behalf of people who knowingly will not use their plans.

Agreed, just did this as well. eHealthInsurance was awesome but I just ran through the same at HealthSherpa and it is an impressively smooth and minimal site. Such a nice change from usual health insurance sites. Granted eHealthInsurance I have used for a few years and it was easy as well. I like that more sites are making it simple and clear.

What we also need is payment through these sites because once you are signed up, paying through Aetna / Blue Cross and others is a inception like web ring from the 90s and not consumer ready, they have been company focused for too long and reliant on mail/phone. The plan I had at Aetna a year ago, had no lie, 7 clicks to get to the payment system. It was all POST ing so you could not go direct. A few pages on others took 30-45 seconds to load. I feel like all insurance companies sites feel like they can waste everyone's time because you have to do it.

Me too. It's an incorrectly written link, as it doesn't include a protocol.

Sorry about that. Which zip code are you in? We are accepting enrollments in the 37 healthcare.gov states - FL, TX, NJ, etc. We are working on adding CA, NY and others soon. To see it all in action, try a FL zip code like 33604. Thank you for taking a look!

I believe it is only the UX...As far as I can see.

At least when I was growing up in the '60s-'70s, the connotations of Sherpa were entirely positive; Wikipedia also doesn't indicate anything bad associated with the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa (well, who knows about the quality of the "psychedelic power pop band from Auckland, New Zealand" :-). A nice, helpful expert who because of nature and nurture was better suited to the extreme environment of the Himalayas, who therefore carried more stuff than the "white" with whom the two formed a team, and got serious billing along with the latter. Moderately well read people from my era give equal billing to the team of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary who first officially conquered the summit of Mount Everest.

Of course, not really following mass media since the '70s I don't know if the term has degraded since then, but at least it started from a good base. It's like the American usage of Indian tribe names for naming sports teams and Army helicopters, that's not done out of disrespect, although there are of course the inevitable malcontents.

No, I'm correct and you're wrong. Irish, Polish, etc are nationalities not ethnicities.

Check wikipedia:

Sherpa (Tibetan: "eastern people", from shar "east" + pa "people") are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the Himalayas.

I know that this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, but my family is Nepali, so I have to clarify two things:

> The Sherpa is one race where nothing negative is said about them...

First of all, this isn't true (source: my Nepali family).

> And if you want to do, better look up about their bravery and count the costs :)

This practice has been a major source of criticism in the past. The Sherpa people are often hired by wealthy foreigners as guides for mountaineering, and while there's a perception that they are "locals" and therefore at less risk during these expeditions, this isn't always the case. It's often been described as an exploitative practice, and I can assure you that many Sherpa people do dislike their ethnic identity being used as a synonym for "guide".