Castlight Health IPO pops as market supports tools to cut healthcare costs

With the highly anticipated public offering for Castlight Health (NYSE: CSLT) only a couple of hours old, observers are likely to have drawn a couple of conclusions. There’s no question it’s a validation of digital health companies, specifically the interest in making consumers more aware of value-based care options and increased price transparency to cut healthcare costs. But the question for today and the coming weeks will be — how big a validation?

On the other hand, some are already concluding that it’s the most overpriced IPO of the century.

To begin with, it debuted at $16, higher than the amended share price range. This morning it shot up more than 150 percent to $41. Despite $13 million in revenues and $62 million in losses for 2013, its valuation tips more than $1 billion.

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A Yahoo Finance column The Exchange had this to say:

“It’s pretty clear a bubble is inflating in this sub-sector of Internet stocks and Castlight makes that incredibly obvious. In early trading, it has more than double the valuation as [cloud service company] Benefitfocus at $3.5 billion with about 1/10 the revenue.”

A post by healthcare economist Al Lewis noted that although some of Castlight’s impact calculations have been “squirelly,” its benefits outweigh that.

“Because the employee is the one saving the money if they are low-enough utilizers not to exhaust their deductibles, [employers] can offer this app as an offset when moving to a high-deductible plan, or use this as one enticement to get employees into a high-deductible plan. Otherwise, direct decreases in [employers’] own health benefit are likely to be modest.”