Ben Handel

So I made that call.

My name is Ben Handel.

I'm an economics professor at UC Berkeley, working in the areas of healthcare economics, industrial organization, and behavioral economics.

One example is, can you find which doctors are actually covered by your health plan?

Let's say you are going to look for a doctor on the insurer's website.

A lot of times the provider database, it's not organized.

It's not updated.

You have no idea if there's a waiting list for any doctor.

So if you just go down the list, you might have to call 25 doctors.

Yeah, I think you frame this really well because those are the two dimensions I think about here.

And I think it's actually very hard to identify between them.

The two dimensions are, is the firm actively trying to make it harder for consumers?

Which is plausible.

And then the second dimension is, are they just doing a bad job because they're not motivated?

Take UnitedHealthcare or some huge insurer, right?

Huge amounts of resources.

And they're selling a major product to consumers.

Now compare your experience looking for doctors in the network to the experience of shopping on Amazon.com.

Amazon, Target, all these retail companies, everything is designed to help you make your purchase as easily and quickly as possible.

It's almost seamless.