HealthCareIsDumb.com

Save money on health insurance by enrolling in college.

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Health & Fitness
Marketplaces
Medical

I needed a cheaper way to get health insurance in America and discovered a loophole to get it. Taking college classes part time qualifies you for full time health insurance!

August 28, 2020 Front page of Hacker News

I posted https://healthcareisdumb.com/ to Show HN on a whim and it took off.

I knew I was in trouble when I got 3 upvotes as soon as I posted it and 25 in the first minute.

The post peaked briefly at #3 where it was getting 300 active visitors at a time.

It was interesting watching the correlation between placement on the page and traffic.

Roughly:
#3 - 300 visitors
#14 - 100 visitors
#24 - 60 visitors

Also had a reporter reach out to me for an interview on Monday, so hopefully I can leverage this boost well.

Results:
100+ new emails
10k+ visitors

Next week I'll focus on getting to know these new users and their problems so that I can build a better v2.

August 25, 2020 First dollar!

We launched with a Buy Me a Coffee button and few expectations of anyone choosing to donate, but today someone gave $3.

We've had 1,200 visitors since launch coming mostly from Twitter and Facebook promotion.

Almost 2/3rds of our traffic have come from Nikhil Krishnan who RT'd us and linked to us from his newsletter https://twitter.com/nikillinit

The rest has been from posting in Facebook groups.

August 21, 2020 Launched Version 0.1

With the database in-hand I created a filtered view of 101 Universities (out of over 500) that had the most complete data, making sure there were at least a few from every state.

Then I embedded the Airtable view into a Carrd website for an easy MVP that I'm currently sharing with friends on Facebook and with you... Announcing https://healthcareisdumb.com/

Our next step is to heavily promote our initial dataset and figure out the best way to create a sustainable product.

August 21, 2020 Completed Initial Dataset

After months of reading through college health insurance plans, and with the help of a whole team of freelance data sleuths, we finally managed to collect at least partial information on every public university in the United States and compile their data into a single searchable Airtable database.

June 2019 Came up with the idea

I'm turning 26 soon, which means as a self-employed freelancer in the USA I'll no longer be able to use my parent's health insurance. Well, it turns out that health insurance in America is expensive.

Who knew?

A few months ago I was skimming Hacker News when I read a comment that said their spouse had enrolled part time at a local university to get cheaper insurance.

Is that really an option? Could it work in every state?

You'd have to factor in tuition and how many credit hours are required as well as the annual insurance cost. Honestly there'd be no way to know what the best option was without literally reading the healthcare policy for every college in the USA. Which wouldn't make sense for anyone to do when they could just work some more gigs or get a full time job...

Anyway, I hate overspending and I'll happily sink hours into saving dollars, so I went ahead and read the healthcare policy at every public university in the United States and compiled it into a single Airtable database.

If you're cheap like me but not dumb like me, you can check out the first 101 universities at https://healthcareisdumb.com/

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I needed a cheaper way to get health insurance in America and discovered a loophole to get it. Taking college classes part time qualifies you for full time health insurance!