
Show HN: Therapy Price Comparison Tool - dhruvmanchala
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDQsYvlM_6B2BH4JZ4WvSM4uUoAWfvYbmYaVrpoCew4/edit?usp=sharing
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dhruvmanchala
Hi everyone, I wanted to share a healthcare price comparison spreadsheet my
partner and I created.

Last year, we were doing a startup that found people therapists. Funnily
enough, we pivoted because prices were so high and we didn't to make a luxury
product.

Over the past few weeks it's become clear to us that people in the US have to
spend increasingly out-of-pocket on healthcare even with insurance. From 2007
to 2017, the percentage of adults with employer health insurance on high-
deductible health plans rose from 15% to 43%. For 2020, a high-deductible
health plan is defined as one with a deductible greater than $1,400. Providers
in certain fields, like therapy, also increasingly just don't take insurance.
About 45% of psychiatrists don't take insurance, and in California about 50%
of therapists don't take insurance.

Healthcare services prices are becoming very relevant, but we couldn't find a
good price comparison tool. For example, I'm looking for a therapist myself,
and I've narrowed my list down to 3 providers. The most expensive one is more
than 200% of the least expensive one.

A couple of days ago we realized we actually have a decent amount of price
data on therapists, so we decided to throw together this spreadsheet and see
if it's useful for anyone.

We have about 120 verified prices that we confirmed over phone or email with
therapists when we were finding people therapists. We also scraped prices for
all the therapists in San Francisco from Psychology Today, the biggest
therapist listing directory. (It's really easy to scrape them.) We also added
any prices in bills we had access to, ours, friends', and family members'.

Note: you'll have to make a copy of the spreadsheet, and there's a tiny lag
when using the dropdowns.

You can see a few interesting things. For example, we recommended the same
therapists to multiple users and the prices were different. Prices also vary
significantly from area to area.

We would love to make this more robust, so if you have any itemized bills for
any healthcare service, not just therapy, we'd love to add them to this
dataset! (Submission link in spreadsheet. We don't use your name, address, or
contact information, so you can hide/remove any information like that.) We're
also open to making it a web app.

Hopefully someone finds this interesting or useful! We'd love feedback, as
well as if ya'll shared any of your experiences paying for healthcare out-of-
pocket or any comparison tools y'all are aware of.

