Health Agents' Advocate Hopes to Boost Consumers' Voice

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.