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Some foes of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act portray the law as nothing less than socialist-style government control of American health care. Noah Lang, a health care entrepreneur, is not one of those people.

Mr. Lang, chief executive of Stride Health, explains that the Affordable Care Act is one of two major developments in the last few years that have made it possible for a company like his San Francisco start-up to exist. The other big force, he says, is the explosion in available health data, led by government initiatives, notably HealthData.gov.

Stride Health has created a recommendation engine for individuals and families buying health insurance. It packs in a lot of personalization in its recommendations, going well beyond premium rates and standard quotes. Stride Health predicts what a household’s actual health care costs are likely to be in a given year.

Its software makes those calculations based not only on age, location and gender, but also health conditions, personal history and drugs taken — taking into account premiums, deductible payments and government subsidy payments, if a person or family qualifies. It allows a person to figure in the likely costs of injuries like a dislocated shoulder or life events like a pregnancy. Some of the information it pulls in automatically, and other data is submitted by users.

Stride Health began offering its recommendation service in California earlier this year. Now, as the sign-up period for health insurance on federal and state exchanges gets underway, Stride Health is bringing out a mobile app version of its recommendation service. The service includes the major insurers and some smaller plans in six states representing 40 percent of the nation’s population: California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The federal and state exchanges offer the same insurance plans, but not Stride Health’s personalized recommendations and detailed cost predictions. “We think of the exchanges as our partners,” Mr. Lang said. “We can take some of the load off them,” he added, in a nod toward the delays and confusion people encountered on the online exchanges last year.

The Affordable Care Act, Mr. Lang explained, has changed the rules for insurance underwriting and opened the door to giving individuals far more bargaining power in purchasing health coverage. Under the legislation, insurers are mostly permitted to ask two questions of prospective customers: age and location.

Previously, an individual or family applying for insurance could be asked all kinds of questions about medical conditions, family history and lifestyle. That system was known as “individual underwriting,” and information was collected by the insurer to tailor prices and terms.

“That’s off the table now,” Mr. Lang said. He views Stride Health as turning the table in the health-insurance marketplace, by collecting information on behalf of individuals to give them a leg up when buying insurance.

Before founding Stride Health last year, Mr. Lang spent five years as a vice president of business development at Reputation.com, a service to control the use of personal information and protect the privacy of its customers. So he has seen how personalization is used online for marketing — and sometimes against people.

“But there is little personalization on the web in health care for the user and buyer,” he said. “Health care is lagging a decade behind the rest of the web.”

His co-founder, Matt Butner, Stride Health’s chief technology officer, came from online advertising and marketing and he worked on recommendation features used at Netflix and Priceline.

The many data sets Stride Health blends in its predictions, Mr. Lang said, allow it to make recommendations based on the health outcomes of many people with similar characteristics and histories. And he compares the approach to weather prediction. Tomorrow’s forecast, he noted, is based partly on today’s weather. But the prediction also pulls in data on weather patterns for months and years in a location.

“We couldn’t have done this even a few years ago,” Mr. Lang said.

HealthData.gov got underway about five years ago. Seeing that little was being done with government health data, the Obama administration gathered 45 researchers, software engineers and entrepreneurs in 2010, gave them 30 data sets and asked them what they could do in 30 days to develop prototype applications. That event became known as the first Health Datapalooza, recalled Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of the Health and Human Services Department.

In June, the fifth annual Health Datapalooza was held in a convention center in Washington, and there were 2,000 attendees. Today, there are 1,700 different data sets on HealthData.gov.

Stride Health, according to Mr. Sivak, is one of the new breed of of data-driven innovators in health care, typically outsiders to the industry who bring a fresh perspective. “They are beginning to use data in incredibly interesting ways that will benefit a whole lot of people,” Mr. Sivak said.

Stride Health’s investors include New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DCM, the Mayo Clinic and Rock Health, an incubator and investor in health start-ups. Stride Health’s business model is being a broker, collecting commissions on sales of recommended insurance policies. “I never thought I’d be selling health insurance,” said Mr. Lang, a graduate of Stanford University.

No one at Stride Health, Mr. Lang insists, knows what the commission is on a policy before a sale, ensuring that recommendations are not skewed to suggest more profitable offerings.