Why we built this
I'm the sort of person who can't leave a thing alone once it stops making sense, and being married to a nurse has given me no shortage of material. My wife would come home from a shift and tell me about her day, I'd ask why on earth it works that way, and quite often neither of us had a good answer. Private health insurance came up more than you'd expect. It's the part people are left to sort out on their own, usually at the point in life when they've got the least patience for it.
Where it started
Eventually I went looking at it properly for our own family. I didn't get very far before a comparison site wanted my phone number.
I don't like giving my number out. It feels personal, and I couldn't see what it had to do with whether we needed cover for my bad back, my broken toe, or the growing list of things in between that have started making noises they didn't used to. So I closed the tab and left it, and then it sat with me for the next few weeks the way these things do.
Why does anyone need my number before they'll show me anything? I'm not naive about it, either. I know that the second I hand it over I stop being a bloke looking at policies and turn into a lead, and that somebody is making money out of me whichever way it goes. I don't even mind that part so much, I'd just like to see what I'm being sold before I become part of the machinery. And why, after all that, is it still so hard to see what actually separates one policy from another?
A bit about me
I'm not an insurance company. I'm a stay-at-home dad with three girls.
I do the school runs, the cooking, the washing and the daily negotiation over what legally counts as dinner. On weekends I make coffee. For roughly the past year my evenings have gone into this instead of the couch with my wife. That's a lot of evenings. She's been very good about it, although the site now gets referred to around the house by name, in the tone you'd normally save for a difficult in-law.
I'm a realist, which people occasionally mistake for being a pessimist. I'm not down on things. I just want things to be fair, and I notice when they aren't.
So I started digging. Funds have to publish a Private Health Information Statement for the policies they sell, and it all lands in a Government database, which sounds like the answer to everything right up until you open it. I spent about six months in there with no real technical skill and a lot of late nights, slowly working out how the whole thing fits together. There's an enormous amount of it, and almost none of it is written for anyone who doesn't already know the answer.
What came out of it
The first thing was asking for less. Health Fund Compare only asks for things that genuinely change your comparison, and where something can reasonably be worked out from an answer you've already given, it gets worked out instead of asked again. If there's a question you'd rather not answer, skip it. Skipping doesn't stop anything — it just means we've got less to go on and the match comes back a little rougher. That trade is yours to make, not ours.
The second was coverage. If we're asking you to trust a comparison, it should be as wide as we can honestly make it, so it works across the products currently open to new members in the published PHIS data rather than a shortlist of funds who've done a deal with us. There's no partner list. Funds do run promotions, and you'll see one where it exists, but it sits on top of the result rather than driving it. The product is matched to you first, on what it covers and what it costs, and the promotion is extra value after that. It never seemed right to let a discount decide which policy suits your family.
The third was just making the difference visible. Two policies can look the same right up until the one detail that matters to you: a limit, a waiting period, an excess, whether something quietly shares its limit with something else. So plans sit side by side with the differences next to each other, instead of spread across two documents you have to hold in your head at once. There are small information buttons all through the site as well, so if a term or a number isn't obvious you can find out what it means without wandering off to research it. I've had to learn all of this the hard way, and I can confirm nobody at a barbecue wants to hear about it.
There isn't one type of person this was built for. Some people want the cheapest thing that'll do the job, some want value, some want stronger extras, some want the widest hospital cover they can afford, and plenty just want somewhere sensible to start. The first match gives you a starting point from your answers, and the filters and priorities are there afterwards to push it toward whatever you actually care about.
What happens to your answers
What you enter stays in your browser while you're comparing. It's sent to our server so the ranking can be worked out, because that's the part that needs the computing, but it isn't written down at the other end, it isn't attached to your name, and it isn't sold or passed to anyone. Once the results come back, the working is gone.
An account is the one case where anything is kept, and even then it's kept for you rather than about you — your answers are saved so you don't have to enter them all again on your next visit, sitting there for you to change or delete whenever you like. We don't build a profile out of it, we don't sell it, and the only thing it's there for is saving you the trouble of typing it all in again.
The privacy and collection notice sets all of this out in full, including what is counted and how to have your data deleted.
The account
You can see the whole comparison without giving us anything — every product, the prices, what's covered, where they differ, side by side. What an account gets you is the exact plan name, and the connection through to the fund or to whoever handles joining.
I know how that reads coming from someone who opened this page complaining about being asked for details, so here's the reasoning: everything you need in order to decide whether we're worth your details is free and already in front of you. You don't hand anything over on a promise. You've had the useful part first, and you're welcome to take it and go.
Money
It's the question I'd ask, so: at the moment this doesn't earn us anything. If that changes, and at some point it probably has to, because servers cost money even when evenings don't, we'll say so here in plain words. It won't change which product comes out in front. That's the one thing we're not willing to move on, because it's the only reason any of this is worth doing.
Where this might go
Everything costs more than it used to. I used to joke that all I ever wanted was a family and a mortgage, and now I've got both, which is either a lesson about ambition or about being careful what you wish for.
We can't do anything about the price of health insurance. What we can do is make it easier to compare and easier to understand, so the person paying the bill can actually see what they're getting for it. There are plenty of other things people get signed up to without ever being shown what's really inside them, and if this works, we'd like a crack at those too. Same rules, though. If we can't do it more openly than it's being done now, there's no reason for us to do it at all.
A comparison should help you make a decision. It shouldn't make it for you.
Thanks for reading this far. That's further than my wife has got, and she lived through it.