Gentle Readers:
Sorry to be incommunicado for so long. I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects.
I built a spreadsheet for myself a few years ago to compare health-insurance plans — cost versus financial exposure/protection. I just built it out into a web app that others can use, and I’ve posted it here.
You enter premiums (after deducting any subsidy), deductibles, co-pays etc. for up to four plans, and it estimates your total outlays in different health/spending scenarios:
It’s especially good for ruling out relatively bad deals. For instance, why would anyone buy the purple plan here for an extra thousand dollars a year, instead of the green plan, which offers the same or better financial protection?
There are simply too many variable in health plans to compare them in your head. I’m hoping this app will be as useful to others as it’s been to me.
Farther afield, the second edition of my Hamlet book was just published, along with a fully hyperlinked ebook edition that I’m rather proud of. (Turns out it was a lot of work to create a really good ebook.) If you’re even one tenth as interested in this play as I am, you might find the book interesting and entertaining. Further insights into the true depths of this obsession at princehamlet.com.
Cross-posted at Angry Bear.