bWell-Informed helps consumers pick the best health care insurance at the best rates

Health care insurance veteran Philip Micali is trying to empower consumers to choose the best insurance at the best rates for their particular medical situations. Micali is founder and CEO of bWell-Informed, a Web site at which consumers can be educated about health insurance, identify which plans are the best for them and get insurance quotes.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Health care insurance veteran Philip Micali is trying to empower consumers to choose the best insurance at the best rates for their particular medical situations.

Micali, a Lyndhurst, Ohio native, recently startedbWell-Informed.com, a Web site at which consumers can be educated about health insurance, identify which plans are the best for them and get  insurance quotes.

“It’s a forgone conclusion,” said CEO Micali, “health care insurance options are getting more complex to understand. bWell-Informed is a technology to help people understand their health care insurance coverage options.”

Micali的公司借从两个趋势:consumer-driven health care, in which consumers take more responsibility for choosing and paying for their health insurance, andpersonalized medicine, in which medical solutions are customized to the individual.

Consumers can find out about and price individual health care insurance at bWell-Informed.com, Micali said. Employers that subscribe to the service can offer it at their intranet sites. The service is free to the consumer. Employers pay an annual license fee, based on number of employees.

Micali describes his service as an “online personalized application… It takes your data on who you are, and the health and wellness status you have, and it predicts your cost of coverage in plans A, B and over time.”

The decision support tool and information at bWell-Informed arm consumers to negotiate the best rates for the insurance plans that best meet their needs, he said.

Though absent from Greater Cleveland for 25Â years, Micali got the idea for bWell-Informed during a visit to Mayfield Heights to pitch the insurance products of then employerLumenosto a large employee group of engineers.

“The manual education process just wasn’t working because there were so many variables. And these were engineers,” Micali said. “I came to the realization that pushing product on people is selling people insurance, it’s not enabling them to buy it. IÂ need to bring something more socially responsible to the marketplace.”

bWell-Informed has relationships with three national online insurance brokerages that treat bWell’s referrals as “qualified leads” and sell consumers the insurance, he said. “We are not a broker. We are not an insurance company. We are a grassroots, eduational provider.”

bWell not only can help you identify the best insurance, it can tell you if you’re under-insured or over-insured, Micali said.

His company has three employees and is growing. He moved bWell to Cleveland from New York City because “the cost of doing business here is lower,” he said. “The access to business is greater than New York, where we were founded.”

Micali said he also was “delighted” to find the technology partners he needed in Cleveland.

Robert Klonk, executive vice president and director of Group Benefits for Cleveland risk manager and insurance brokerÂOswald Cos., tried out the bWell-Informed site at the behest of a reporter. “I’m very impressed with the quality of the site,” Klonk said.

It took about 20 minutes for the health insurance expert to fulfill the beta site’s requirements, such as watch an educational video about health savings accounts and supply information before getting a list of 133 individual insurance options.

“That’s a lot of options,” Klonk said, and may overwhelm the average consumer who already has taken the better part of a half hour to get the list. “Does the site inform? Yes, it does. Does it have all the markets covered? Yes.”

But Klonk said he is unlikely to use it. “For young people who love to do everything online, they’d probably love this,” he said. “I’m 51. I need somebody who will sit across the desk from me and tell me what this all means.”

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