New Comparison Tool for health insurance

E

eastmeath

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I've been a regular reader in the media, and recently on the various threads here about the frustrations of navigating health plans.

At the start of the year I was handed the annual family renewal chore and nearly tore my hair out trying to challenge the price and benefits vs what was on the market. I’ve had the same frustration other had with the HIA tool. I’m a dev, so I built a new site to help. It tries to normalise the plans across all providers and score them based on your specific preferences.

I’ve put a beta of the tool live today at www.medplan.ie

Please note this tool is non-commercial. I am not an advisor, and I have zero affiliation with any plan provider or advisor. Ive built this in with my own time and resources.

It differs from the current approach in that it shows every plan on the market by cost and 'score'. The scoring is an algorithm based on plan features; I've taken c30 features from every plan. While in many cases it is apples vs. oranges, it is a genuine attempt to independently score each policy and to break the somewhat false differentiation that the issuers build into the products. It's not perfect, but the goal is to give the consumer a much smaller radius of plans to look at.

Brendan, I saw your recent post about suggestions for the HIA CEO; I’d be very interested to hear those ideas to see if they could be built in here.

I'd love to get some feedback from the power-users on this forum on what they think of this score/price based approach. Thanks!
 
At first glance, it looks good.

It's still overwhelming but I suspect that is because the underlying plans are overwhelming.

Brendan
 
eastmeath said:
I saw your recent post about suggestions for the HIA CEO; I’d be very interested to hear those ideas to see if they could be built in here.
Click to expand...

I set them out here

Redesigning health insurance policies to make them comparable and promote competition

I set out yesterday morning to review my health insurance and have found the process bewildering as I do every year. I have suggested new format for questions on askaboutmoney to help identify good value policies But I have since thought that we should tell the health insurers to redesign their...
www.askaboutmoney.com
 
I can't open this website:

1775664741490.webp
 
I like the idea, but I am not sure it's accurate which would be a big fault.

I have the Laya Control 600 Connect and got the following

1775665028754.webp


If I understand that correct, the green policies are all better and cheaper! What is not to like?

I clicked on the pink dot and got (When I hit Print Screen the pop up disappears)

Control 600 Connect — €1948 p.a.

Plan PDFretrieved 01-04-2026 (133)

Precision 600 Total — €1623 p.a.

Plan PDFretrieved 01-04-2026 (197)
Yearly Saving Save €325/yr


Other Key Differences​

  • Why choose Precision 600 Total
    • Lower monthly cost with similar core hospital coverage
    • Includes digital GP access and specialist referrals
    • Offers day-to-day benefits for dental and physiotherapy
  • Why choose Control 600 Connect
    • Includes digital GP and specialist access via app
    • Offers comprehensive hospital coverage with no excess on in-patient care
    • Provides day-to-day benefits for physiotherapy and optical

MedPlan Analysis:​

"Control 600 Connect from Laya offers more extensive digital access and a broader range of day-to-day benefits, including optical coverage, while Precision 600 Total from Laya provides a lower cost structure with comparable hospital coverage and similar digital GP access. Both plans include specialist access, but Control 600 Connect from Laya may have a slight edge in comprehensive in-patient care with no excess, whereas Precision 600 Total from Laya focuses on cost efficiency while maintaining essential day-to-day benefits like dental and physiotherapy. The key difference lies in the scope of additional benefits, with Control 600 Connect from Laya providing more varied day-to-day support and Precision 600 Total from Laya prioritizing affordability with core coverage."

Just didn't sound right, so I checked them against the HIA website and my key requirement hi tech hospitals are not covered by the Precision 600.
So I don't think it's right to say "Better cover"

Maybe "different cover"?


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hmmm, the "Precision 600 Total" benefit description pdf from laya states

1775667796987.webp



it is likely that it is getting a score for hi-tech because of this. The computer is reading the line "Full Cover in Mater Private...." and not qualifying it by the line above. i need to dig into the detail. Also on the other side, Control 600 Connect has a high nightly excess for hitech and this is bringing down the score. ("full cover" is highly misleading here IMO)
 
I did another run through it and it suggested that the Irish Life Select Plus with Day 2 Day Pack has better cover for a very slightly lower price. So definitely worth checking out.

I like the way MedPlan brings me directly to the brochure for the Irish Life product, but the brochure says

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But what does "Selected hospitals only" mean? That is not a criticism of medplan, but a criticism of Irish Life for having that caveat in light writing which is hard to see and then not listing them.

Again, I tried the HIA comparison tool and it is more or less the same.

I googled it and got this AI answer

  • Other High-Tech Hospitals: Coverage for Blackrock Clinic or Mater Private may be limited, restricted, or not included depending on the specific 2026 handbook, often focusing on cardiac or specialized treatments.
I now see this on the Irish Life brochure at the top
You should read this table of cover along with the Health Plans
membership handbook effective from January 2026, which you can
find on irishlifehealth.ie/more-info . The hospitals and treatment centres covered on this plan are set out in List 3 in Part 12 of your Health Plans membership handbook.

On page 52, I find that the hi tech hospitals are not covered.

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HI Protocol, RE: I can't open this website:
Thanks for flagging — really sorry about the timing! There's a known SSL compatibility issue with some Cloudflare configurations affecting a small number of users, which I'm actively working to resolve.

In the meantime, could you try accessing it on a personal laptop/desktop outside a corporate network? Some corporate firewalls and older browsers can interfere with the SSL connection. (looks like your system is looking for an older RSA certificate, im using a ECDSA cert)

Apologies for the inconvenience — I'll post an update once it's resolved.
 
Well done @eastmeath and thank you for the time you have put into this! It's a very nice design, more intuitive than the HIA one.

Where did you get all of the data for each plan? It looks like you scraped PDFs?

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If you are doing it that way instead of getting the structured data from HIA or the insurers directly, how will it remain up to date?

I may be completely different to most consumers but I really dislike ranking things like this:

1775679882473.webp


Instead of 1-5, I would rather a binary rank yes/don't care. Is it necessary to rank though? Have you designed it so that the priorities represent the most discriminating questions for highest yield?

Even with the pop-ups I suspect it's not clear to most people what a hi-tech hospital or a specialist procedure is.

The pop-ups don't show fully on some:

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You have a lot of detail explaining the system, which is interesting, but it can be overwhelming:

1775680801275.webp
10% of adults have literacy levels of primary school or below, so the clearer and more concise the better.

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I would also suggest avoiding "Ophth", maybe using "Eyes".
 

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arbitron said:
If you are doing it that way instead of getting the structured data from HIA or the insurers directly, how will it remain up to date?
Click to expand...

I was wondering that myself. But if you can get it to work well with the data at a point in time, and it's better than the HIA, then it could replace the HIA one. That is a big If. But it's worth trying to get it right with static data to test the concept.
 
One minor observation - the comparison quadrant plot image doesn't appear very well on mobile unless I switch to the desktop mode in Chrome. Maybe not much that can be done about that and it's better to use the tool on a computer or tablet rather than a phone screen?
 
thanks everyone for reviewing the site and the comments. these are really helpful.

@arbitron re"If you are doing it that way instead of getting the structured data from HIA or the insurers directly, how will it remain up to date?"
ive created a neat pipeline with ML to consume the ipid docs for each plan. its not that much work now to do a complete full refresh, i basically had to do a full refresh that last weekend because so many plans were repriced and had benefit changes on april 1. the aim would be to do that regularly if it is used. the HIA is a proprietary database and i havent interfaced with the insurers. fair point on the readability and the labels. re: rankings, i did have it as binary, but it felt it needed a bit more granularity.

@ClubMan i agree re: mobile, its not possible to put that amount of data on a small screen, i do plan to come up with a more mobile friendly design - its a tricky one.

@Protocol at the moment it is only based on the adult price, family pricing is a good idea for a future feature - it is not that hard.

@Brendan Burgess ill fix that Precision 600 Total plan data, and your comment about the 'better cover' /'worse cover'legend is totally correct. thanks

@Sue Ellen yes the site will email you a code which you can then use that code to login. or if you have a gmail account you can authenticate directly on this. its to stop bots and commercial operators crawling through the site.
 
eastmeath said:
@ClubMan i agree re: mobile, its not possible to put that amount of data on a small screen, i do plan to come up with a more mobile friendly design - its a tricky one.
Click to expand...
Thanks. No worries. I appreciate that it's probably difficult to convey the necessary info on a small phone screen in mobile rather than desktop mode. I'll try to play with the tool a bit more and see if I have any (more :) ) useful feedback.
 
eastmeath said:
@ClubMan i agree re: mobile, its not possible to put that amount of data on a small screen, i do plan to come up with a more mobile friendly design - its a tricky one.
Click to expand...
eastmeath said:
@Protocol at the moment it is only based on the adult price, family pricing is a good idea for a future feature - it is not that hard.
Click to expand...

Don't try to do everything.

Prove the concept with it working on a laptop/desktop for adults

Someone else tried to prove a concept with just one of the insurance companies which I thought was clever.
 
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