Coverage Web

The official web client for Coverage

Coverage is an open source health insurance coverage finder. Just answer a few simple questions and Coverage will return a list of health insurance plans available in your area along with how much of a government subsidy you're eligible to receive to help pay your premiums each month.

Setup

Once you've forked or cloned the project, setup is easy. Follow the steps below and heed to warnings about project dependencies.

Coverage requires Node.js >= v5.4.1 and the following installed globally:

• Bower
• Gulp
• PM2
• Mocha
• Browserify

Once all global packages have been installed run npm install && bower install to install all required dependencies.

Installing all dependencies

1. Run npm install -g bower gulp-cli mocha pm2 browserify to install all global dependencies at once.
2. Once all global packages have been installed just run npm install && bower install to install all required project dependencies

Securing secret data

Coverage gets all of it's important runtime configuration options in the environment (Node's process.env will return an object containing your environment variables). Rather than using a solution like dotenv I've opted to use a simple shell script instead. The script sets environment variables by exporing variables in the terminal environment.

1. Copy envvars.sh.sample to envvars.sh (you must name it this exact name as our .gitignore file is set up to ignore it so your secret API keys don't get leaked all over GitHub)
2. Edit envvars.sh in your favorite text editor. Change all of the variable values that apply to your situation

In production you should use a solution like PM2 to set your environment variables. The envvars.sh file is reserved for development and testing use only.

Run it locally

Make sure you've installed all dependencies before proceeding.

1. Set environment variables with source envvars.sh. You only need to source the envvars.sh file once per terminal session. It only needs to be run in the terminal window/tab that will be running the local web server and only in development and test environments
2. Start a local development server by simply running gulp. The gulp command will invoke the default Gulp task and do the following:

• Try to set environment variables (currently a bug prevents this from working so we source envvars.sh first for now)
• Watch all JS, LESS, and most other important files and directories for changes
  • The watch tasks will transpile LESS to CSS, JSX (React) to regular JavaScript, lint your scripts, package your scripts using Browserify, and more
• Start a local development server

Now visit http://localhost:9000 and you'll see... a 404 error. Thats because Coverage does not come with a homepage. There are routes set up for every controller file in the app (like /quotes, /login, /signup, etc.). The Coverage philosophy is to provide you the APIs and functionality you need to run the app and its up to you to implement any marketing or landing pages. We're giving you an insurance quote engine client and leaving the customization up to you.

Deploying

We recommend Nginx proxied to the Express app monitored by PM2. More deployment instructions and advice coming soon...

Getting access to the Quoting API

Coverage is pretty useless without access to an external API that'll return insurance quote results. For that reason I have some advice for how to deal with this.

Method 1: Using the Q API

The data used to generate quote results is hosted at the official Q website. You must have a client ID and a secret key to call the official Q API. To get these credentials please open an issue or directly email me for access or more information.

Method 2: Roll your own data API

Alternatively you can host the data yourself and connect Coverage Web to your own insurance plan API. The data sets are 100%, completely free, open source, and maintained by the Federal Government at Data.HealthCare.gov. Here is a direct link to the data required to run your own insurance quoting API. *Hint: You're looking for 7 QHP data files. Convert/export/download those into CSV files and import them into your database of choice then build an API around it. Yeah, I know, easier said than done but if you want to be totally self-sufficient you can use this data.

If you go this route you'll just need to make sure that the data input/output is consistent with how Q accepts and returns data. You can find all of this by reading the Q docs

Tips, tricks, and advice

Remember, Coverage is only an API client. It needs to query for plan results from an API that will respond with a JSON array of government provided health insurance plans. Please either ask for access to Q (which I host and may ask you to pay for access depending on your proposed use - it's a case by case basis) or use the direct link to the data to create your own simple quoting API. It's easy. Simply set up an endpoint that'll accept demographic information and return an array of plans based on the input. See the official Q docs as an example to model your API off of.

If you use the Q API

We use a similar authentication scheme as AWS. We give you a client ID and secret. Your requests to Q should be signed using your secret token. Instructions and details are available on the Q documentation site.

If you run your own data API

My advice to you is to model your API client off of our q-client API library and have an understanding of the the Affordable Care Act and how it handles querying for search results.

Contributing

I welcome contributions. See the contributing file. Here's the short version:

1. Create your own fork
2. Always cut your own branches off of the develop branch

How to calculate Obamacare (ACA) subsidies?

Check out these resources listed in order of helpfulness:

• About.com article - This is how we got the original subsidy estimate formula
• Excellent explanation of the subsidy calculation from Value Penguin - This will help you understand how the subsidy works but is not as helpful as the About.com article to get the actual formula

Code Style

Clean code is good code. Clean code is happy code. In general, follow the example set in the project code and read more about code style in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Coverage Web is licensed under the MIT License. You can read the full license here but the gist of it is this:

• You may use this code for free
• You may use this code for commercial or non-commercial purposes
• You are not required to publish your changes to the code
• You do not hold the author or contributors liable for anything
• You must give credit to the original author in some form. I prefer a link to my personal website but simply leaving my name in the license file will suffice. This project has been stolen and passed off as someone else's work in the past. Be sure you're using the original by checking the commit history, License, and package.json file for consistency

Disclaimer

Coverage works by default by making requests to an external API to get quotes and subsidy data. In order to run quotes you must either build your own quoting API or sign up for Q, the quoting API. The data used to generate quotes is available for download for free from Data.Healthcare.gov and the formula for estimating insurance subsidies is also freely available by doing a quick Google search. Coverage has been built from the ground up and does not use code from any other project besides the 3rd party open source libraries it depends on. Remember: all data output from this software is 100% free and public knowledge! If you can download the Healthcare.gov data sets then you can make your own insurance plan finder.

To get API credentials open up a new issue on this repository and I'll set you up with a set of credentials. Remember, this is only if you choose to use my Q API. You're free to download the required data sets for free from the federal government and run your own quoting API.