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Jessica Brooks-Woods. Credit: Pittsburgh Group on Health

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Health Agents' Advocate Hopes to Boost Consumers' Voice

By Allison Bell

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What You Need to Know

  • The benefits policy veteran now heads an organization with about 100,000 agents and broker members.
  • Brooks-Woods has worked for Highmark, and she ran the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health.
  • When she started at PBGH, she had to work with an agent to get her family covered.

The new chief executive officer of the National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals wants to use agents’ and brokers’ skills and insights to make the U.S. health care system work better for all Americans.

Jessica Brooks-Woods, the benefits policy veteran who took over from Janet Stokes Trautwein as the association’s leader in September, said in a recent interview that NABIP members are in a great position to help other players understand how the health care and health insurance systems are really working.

“Health care in this country tends to be siloed,” Brooks-Woods said.

Too often, she said, providers and policymakers create a world where most people have health insurance, but patients with serious problems aren’t sure where to go to get the right kind of care, and patients have no idea how to handle the deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs.

“Coverage isn’t enough,” Brooks-Woods said. “How do we center the voice of the consumer in the conversation?”

What it means: NABIP, the 93-year-old group formerly known as the National Association of Health Underwriters, may become even more prominent in efforts to find ways to improve the affordability, accessibility and quality of health care in ways that work in the real world, not simply in theory.

The leader: Brooks-Woods grew up in western Pennsylvania. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State and a master’s degree in public management from Carnegie Mellon, and she worked for Lockheed Martin and Highmark.

From 2013 through 2022, she was the executive director of the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health, an employer benefits policy group.

She also has worked as an adjunct professor, teaching classes on topics such as human resource management, at Penn State.

She has since served on many health-related boards, including the board of Pennie, Pennsylvania’s state-run ACA public exchange program.

The patients’ perspective: When Brooks-Woods began running the Pittsburgh group, she was pregnant and had two small children, and PBGG did not provide health insurance for its employees.

A health insurance agent got her through that difficult period by helping her apply for individual coverage through the newborn Affordable Care Act public health insurance exchange program.

From the experience of working for PBGH and from experiences with setting up health care access, navigation and employment programs for others, such as U.S. Health Desk and Rise Health Equity, organizations that try to help patients make the health care system respond to their needs, Brooks-Woods learned about how patients really feel.

“They feel alone,” Brooks-Woods said. “They feel like it’s complex. There’s a connectivity issue.”

She has met women with health insurance who appear to have breast cancer but who have not seen the right doctors because of worries about out-of-pocket costs.

Even when patients have insurance, can afford the cost-sharing bills and have providers, they may have trouble finding providers who will take their concerns about symptoms seriously, she said.

“What’s missing is empathy,” she said. “It’s a muscle that needs to be strengthened and exercised more.”

She’s hoping that artificial intelligence will help, by giving patients access to tools they can use to find resources and advocate for themselves.

The NABIP role: Now, as the CEO of NABIP, Brooks-Woods oversees an organization with about 100,000 members who are experts in health care system navigation, explaining complicated problems clearly, and selling.

NABIP is in the rooms where any serious health-related policy discussions happen.

“We don’t have one view about what health care should look like,” Brooks-Woods said.

But NABIP does want the health care system to provide practical, affordable, high-quality services for patients, and it wants the system to provide workable solutions for the employers that pay for much of the care.

In recent months, for example, NABIP has weighed in with public comments on bread-and-butter federal actions that could affect the daily lives of agents and brokers, such as concerns about the Federal Trade Commission’s approach to regulate non-compete clauses for organizations’ former employees and efforts by the U.S. Labor Department to update the rules for determining who is an employee and who is an independent contractor.

The organization has also submitted a 32-page comment on federal agencies’ efforts to wrestle with parity requirements for mental health and substance use disorder care.

NABIP agreed on the need to improve health plan enrollees’ access to behavioral health care, by doing things such as improving health plans’ provider directories, but it also emphasized the need to consider the real-world obstacles to improving access, such as many care providers’ lack of interest in joining plans’ provider networks.

In recent years, NABIP has been helping members wrestle with tough new and proposed federal regulations, such as new requirements that commercial plan brokers disclose their commissions; new requirements that Medicare Advantage plan sellers record all sales calls; and draft requirements that could wipe most most funding for Medicare Advantage plan field marketing organization compliance support programs.

In some cases, Brooks-Woods said, NABIP is the one of the players pushing for more federal action.

In the area of compensation, for example, “we’re comfortable with disclosures,” she said. “We believe that we provide great value and our compensation is justified.”

She noted that NABIP would like to see regulators do more to promote compliance with other federal transparency rules, such as hospital price transparency rules.

Another concern is regulatory efforts that seem to mix NABIP members up with other types of people, such as Medicare Advantage program marketing rules that are developed in response to concerns about national marketing organizations and end up applying to traditional, brick-and-mortar agents, who have nothing to do with the concerns about the national organizations, she said.

Trust: Policymakers at federal agencies and in Congress often turn to NABIP for advice about issues, and Brooks-Woods said she hopes to build on NABIP’s reputation as a source of even-handed assessments of health policy issues.

“Health care isn’t necessarily a trusted industry,” she said. “We need to play our part in rebuilding trust.”

Partisan gridlock: Brooks-Woods also sees NABIP as an organization that can bridge the divide between Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

Republicans and Democrats may present their support for various proposals differently, but, in the end, they often agree on proposals to do things like simplify employer benefits reporting paperwork, she said.

She also believes that the goal of improving the affordability and quality of care has broad, bipartisan support.

“It’s an American issue,” she said.

Jessica Brooks-Woods. Credit: Pittsburgh Group on Health

Allison Bell

Think_Allison

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