Research

Research

Private health insurance moves $1.6 trillion a year. Nobody inside the system can see all of it. We are mapping the whole thing.
Papers weekly · Field notes daily · Corrections in public
The model
Benefits-native model

Fathom

v2.1 · live inside Keel

Fathom reads the plan documents carriers publish and answers questions about them, pointing every answer back to the exact line it came from. If an answer cannot be checked, it does not ship.

GroundedProvenance on every claimHIPAA · zero-retentionHuman-in-the-loop
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This week's paper
This week · June 6, 2026Governance

A denial is a bet you won't appeal.

Insurers denied roughly 85 million in-network claims in 2024, and the appeal numbers show exactly how that wager is priced.
Read it →14 min read
<1%
of denied claims are ever appealed. The other 99 percent of the bet pays off.

Field Notes

One data point a day.
Today · June 11, 2026
1.2M
Arbitration was built for 17,000 disputes. It got 1.2 million.
2 min
June 10, 2026
18%
Secret shoppers got an appointment 18 percent of the time.
2 min
Tomorrow
An 85 percent discount nobody bought.
Papers

Each one started as a question we could not find a straight answer to.

Next week

The deductible never made a shopper.

The cleanest natural experiment ever run on deductibles found exactly zero price shopping.
No. 07
June 6, 2026Governance

A denial is a bet you won't appeal.

Insurers denied roughly 85 million in-network claims in 2024, and fewer than 1 percent were ever appealed.
<1% of denied claims appealed
No. 06 · 14 min read
→
June 5, 2026Behavior

Half the menu is a trap.

At roughly half of US firms that offer a choice, one plan costs less in every possible year, and people pick the other one anyway.
1 in 2 firms has a dominated menu
No. 05 · 14 min read
→
June 2, 2026Governance

Show your work, or do not ship.

An AI that cannot prove why it did what it did is a hazard, so the audit trail has to be built into the model, not bolted on.
81.7% of appealed denials overturned
No. 04 · 12 min read
→
May 27, 2026Behavior

The right plan, for this exact life.

People are not careless about choosing benefits; the choice is genuinely beyond what a person can solve in their head.
61% chose a dominated plan
No. 03 · 11 min read
→
May 19, 2026Cost

The only market with no price.

The one large market where you cannot learn the price before you buy, predict what you will need, or read the contract you signed.
9.1x same-procedure price spread
No. 02 · 11 min read
→
May 12, 2026Economics

Nobody holds the whole truth.

Benefits is a relay, and at every handoff a fee is taken and a piece of the truth gets dropped.
$26,993 average family premium
No. 01 · 12 min read
→
Open problems

What we have not cracked yet

None of these are solved. If you have been close to one, write us: more@meetkeel.ai

Grounding

Finding the answer in messy documents, and proving it

Plan documents contradict each other. A wrong answer here is not a bad demo, it is a real problem for a real person.

Evals

A benchmark for benefits truth

There is no standard for whether benefits advice is correct, so we are building one. You cannot ship "mostly right" on someone's coverage.

Privacy

Personalization that never exposes private data

Understanding a real life without ever leaking it. Privacy is a constraint we design around from day one, not a feature we add later.

Agents

Software that acts, accountably

An agent that enrolls, files, and follows up for a person, with a full record of everything it did and why it did it.

The ledger

Counted from what we have shipped. As of June 11, 2026.

6
Papers
6
Field notes
59
Primary sources cited
9
Statistics retired
0
Corrections
Working hypotheses
Status changes as papers ship.
  • The margin migrates to wherever measurement stops.Argued · No. 01
  • Skin in the game never made a shopper.Next week
  • Experience does not cure plan choice.Open
  • Transparency fails without a machine reader.Open
  • Underwriting is conserved: ban it in one layer and it re-forms in another.Open
Retired numbers
Statistics we will not cite, and why.
  • "80 percent of medical bills contain errors."
    Traces to no study. Only audited figure: Medicare CERT, 6.55%.
  • "Employees spend 18 minutes choosing benefits."
    No primary source exists. Verified: 67% spend under 30 minutes (Voya).
  • "PBMs keep your rebates."
    GAO: 99.6% pass through. The margin moved to dispensing and fees.
  • "Arbitration disputes ran 10x projections."
    Stale. H1 2025 ran roughly 140x the annual projection.
The daily note

One data point every morning, with its source.

Nothing else.

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The bar is the work on this page.

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