hm so you shouldn't have been required to submit an email after the initial search (there's a check box to dismiss it).
When you say you entered some details, are you saying after you searched, saw results, and tried to book someone? If so, we are not collecting email, but actually are collecting your insurance information. We need that to get your specific out-of-pocket cost (e.g. copay, deductible, out-of-pocket max, etc.)
Do you mind trying again or emailing us at [email protected] with some more details?
Great question! So particularly if you have a high deductible health plan (which has become the most popular plan for Americans over the last decade) or a plan with a copay that doesn't cover every service (which is most plans), it's common to receive unexpected medical bills.
A simple example for me is I had a high deductible health plan (while working as a software engineer at Uber) where I went to see a dermatologist to remove a wart, but I had no idea how much it would cost until weeks or months after the visit. It turns out that cost of seeing a dermatologist and getting liquid nitrogen treatment can vary by hundreds of dollars depending on where you go, even if you use your insurance.
So Certainly shows you the upfront price that is specific to your insurance and lets you compare prices across providers. And if you book through us, you don't need to worry about surprise bills since we guarantee that you won't owe more than the prices we show upfront.
Good question - so the problem we're focused on solving and that we've personally experienced is surprise medical bills, which generally only happen if you have health insurance. The Transparency in Coverage Rule that went into effect in July 2022 is the unlock to solving this since it required all insurance companies to publish prices in public machine readable JSON files that could be ingested.
Medical tourism is definitely something we'd want to eventually add, though that pricing data is not accessible in one place like the insurance company data, so it seems to be a bit harder starting place.
With that said, you are absolutely correct that CAC is probably the biggest challenge with this marketplace. Healthcare is generally infrequent and unpredictable (unlike travel or groceries). But the market is huge (probably biggest in the US), and there's only been one company that's made any kind of dent in becoming a consumer marketplace (Zocdoc). Our hope/belief is that being the first place to allow consumers to see prices creates the product-market fit to lower that CAC and gain traction over time, but time will tell!
Yes, we do! There is a procedure code and corresponding rate for each type of medical procedure/service that can be done, and that includes ER visits. For example, when I went to the ER for an ankle issue, I was billed for https://www.aapc.com/codes/cpt-codes/99284 which had a corresponding rate of $1072.50 for my insurance.
So we can predict what the cost of the visit is. However, emergency care is much more difficult to predict the total cost of in terms of what gets done during the visit. For my visit, I also had x-ray imaging done, but it can be more difficult to predict the full scope of services that could be done during an ER visit.
So it is something we plan to address later. But it should be a tractable problem that we plan to solve.
When you say you entered some details, are you saying after you searched, saw results, and tried to book someone? If so, we are not collecting email, but actually are collecting your insurance information. We need that to get your specific out-of-pocket cost (e.g. copay, deductible, out-of-pocket max, etc.)
Do you mind trying again or emailing us at [email protected] with some more details?