EHealth's Web Site Tries To Take The Stress Out Of Health Insurance

If you want to give most Americans a scare, sneak up behind them and say, health insurance! Expensive, complicated and hard to get -- that's all a lot of people know about health plans. But one company is trying to make getting health coverage nearly as simple as booking plane tickets on Travelocity.

EHealth started building it in 1997, as yet another Silicon Valley company in the tech boom trying to bring a traditional business online. The task was made more difficult by the infamously arcane world of health insurance.

The firm also had to win the trust of the health plans so they'd be willing to use eHealth as a conduit. By now it is partnered with some 200 insurers, led by UnitedHealth UNH and WellPoint (NYSE:WLP) WLP. It serves all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

EHealth has long been trying to persuade carriers to let it integrate their underwriting rules into its software, so as to automate the process. Huizinga says insurers lagged because underwriting "is as much art as science," and they weren't sure if a machine should do the job.

Huizinga acknowledges that even the "instant" platform won't be completely instant for everyone. Some will be instantly accepted, some instantly rejected, and some will get requests for more information while the underwriters figure them out.

It may sound strange for a small U.S. company that's not even in Canada to launch in China. In the Nov.1 conference call, one analyst asked why eHealth chose the second-tier city of Xiamen for its launch rather than Beijing or Shanghai.