Historically, your healthcare has been limited to your health insurance, and that insurance decision was made well before you got to the table—your employer tried to pick a few plans that covered the best and worst outcomes across all of their employees, but everyone ended up in a one-size-fits-none situation.
Thatch is changing that by unlocking plan choice: your employer sets a health budget, then you choose your own plan from tens or hundreds of options. Any money you don't spend on insurance gets kept to be spent on accessing care: copays, prescriptions, blood tests, therapy, imaging, and even cash paying for providers who don't take the insurance you end up on.
That choice is empowering, but it can also be scary. Choosing health insurance is like a role-playing game, where people run the scenario analyses of "if I make move X, then Y will happen" to figure out what'll work best; but getting one move wrong in that "game" has real-world implications to your family and your health.
So we built a product to help: It asks about your health priorities, then uses those and the money your employer is offering to narrow those hundreds of options down to the few that best fit your life.
It starts with you
We can't recommend the right plan until we understand the person choosing it. We ask about the things that actually decide whether a plan fits you: the doctors, hospitals, and prescriptions you want to keep; the conditions you manage and how often you need care; and whether there's anything on the horizon that we should take into account, like pregnancy, a needed surgery, or prepping for young kids' inevitable ER visits. (This information is never shared with anyone—neither your employer nor the insurance company you pick. We can't even see it ourselves on the Thatch side.)
Choosing health insurance is a financial decision as much as a medical one, so we ask about that side too: how much you can comfortably pay each month, and whether you'd rather save part of your budget for later or spend more now to protect against a big bill.
As you change your answers, your rubric updates with you, so you're learning how your priorities map to plans, not just scrolling a list.
We read the fine print so you don't have to
Every plan comes with a stack of dense documents: Summary of Benefits, formularies, provider networks, deductibles, copays, coinsurance, out-of-pocket maximums, referral rules, exclusions.
No one should have to read all of that, so we read it for you. Thatch ingests the documents and benefits data behind every plan so we can understand how each one handles primary care, specialists, prescriptions, maternity care, mental health, labs, imaging, chronic conditions, and more. A pile of PDFs becomes a plan we understand well enough to make a recommendation on.
No jargon. Just what it costs, and why it fits.
When people choose a plan, they're really doing math. Premium, deductible, what's left of the health budget. With personalized budget guidance, we've done the math for you.
Every recommendation leads with one number: our estimate of what the plan will actually cost you per month, all in. It rolls in the insurance cost, the copays, the prescriptions, and the care you told us is coming, with your health budget subtracted.
Then we explain it in words, in terms of what we already know you care about. For someone with diabetes who wants to keep their doctor, that sounds like:
This plan covers your insulin, keeps Dr. Smith in your network, and runs about $75 to $150 a month for your regular care. Your budget covers roughly $200 more than the plan costs, so your routine diabetes care is covered without paying out of pocket.
What's behind that one number
In short, we assign a dollar amount to each line item in your rubric, then subtract it from your health budget.
A health priority isn't a cost on its own, so we use health episodes1 to give an apples-to-apples view of costs across plans. Say you tell us you take Ozempic and you're managing heart disease. That becomes a year of monthly prescription fills, regular cardiology visits, and the routine labs that go with them.
We use the plan's actual rules—how much you pay before coverage kicks in (your deductible), what you owe for each visit or prescription after that (your copay or coinsurance), and the most you'd ever have to pay in a year (your out-of-pocket maximum)—to land on a single cost number, and even estimate how much it'd cost you to pay directly for care that the plan says isn't covered, like an out-of-network doctor or prescription.
Cost isn't the whole story, though. We also build a fingerprint for every plan (a profile of its core features), and score how closely that fingerprint matches the priorities you gave us. There's often a plan that's only a few dollars more each month but covers far more of the care you actually use, and you'd never know to look for it.
That fit score and your cost estimate combine into one overall result.
Then we run one last pass over every plan, using a clustering algorithm to find the ones that genuinely stand apart from the pack. That's why some people see one recommended plan and others see three, and why one person's picks might all be bronze plans while others all come from a single insurance company. What you see reflects your priorities, the plans in your area, and what each one will cost against your health budget.
Sometimes the best answer isn't only insurance
Your health budget also frees you up from depending only on your plan to get the care you need. Sometimes a cheaper plan plus some add-ons beats a richer plan on its own.
So we rank plans and bundles side by side, on the same all-in cost basis:
Gold plan: $973/mo
Silver plan + continuous glucose monitor + endocrinologist copay support: $923/mo
Gold plan + dental + vision: $1,079/mo
We make those tradeoffs obvious, and tell you when the cheaper plan is the better one.
And you're never choosing alone
Most members get to a confident choice on their own: 91% pick their plan without needing help. For everyone else, or anyone who just wants a second opinion, our licensed advisors are available for one-on-one calls before you decide.
Because every recommendation explains its own reasoning, an advisor can walk through exactly why we suggested one plan over another, and help you decide whether you weigh things differently. And if there's genuinely no great fit for your needs in your area, we'd rather tell you that plainly than dress up a mediocre option as a win.
Your employer will love it, too
Employers don't want to become experts on the hundreds of plans their employees can access through Thatch. They want to offer great benefits, keep costs predictable, and know their team is taken care of.
Traditional group plans force one coverage decision on everyone, and force your benefits admin into also being your insurance advisor. Thatch lets them focus on being an expert in their employees, instead. (And 93% of those employees say our experience is good or great, so they can rest easy in that handoff.)
That's what Thatch is: personalized health benefits, built on the details of every plan, a real understanding of what each person needs, and cost estimates honest enough to trust.
1 Thatch isn't making any clinical recommendations on the right course of treatment for your particular conditions or priorities. We use a standard set of assumptions for each care episode, so your actual costs may be higher or lower.
