Jack Hooper jokes that he used to be cool and now sells insurance. While his early days as an analyst for the CIA and a field intelligence agent for the FBI would make great fodder for a TV thriller, his company’s impact on small employers and the transformation of the healthcare industry may have a more lasting impact than his career. a federal agent.

Hooper founded Dallas-based Take Command Health, which serves small employers who want to supplement their employees’ health insurance but don’t have the size or margin for a traditional group health plan. The company is helping employers launch a product created in the wake of the Affordable Healthcare Act called the individual insurance Health Reimbursement Account (HRA), which allows employers to reimburse employees for healthcare expenses such as premiums, out-of-pocket expenses, co-payments and deductibles. . . It differs from a health savings account in that HRA funds are limited to employees enrolled in an individual health plan purchased through the ACA Marketplace. Hooper calls this service “the 401(k) of health insurance.”

Founded in 2014, Take Command aims to work with small employers by helping their employees shop for insurance on the Marketplace, supporting the employee throughout the process and meeting regulatory requirements for managing HRA. The company supports 6,000 employer customers, 120 full-time and 60 part-time.

Hooper says he always asks employers a basic question: Should they be responsible for their employees’ health care? Most answer “no”. But when organizations purchase a group plan, they make themselves responsible for their employees’ healthcare costs. HRA allows employees to purchase what is best for them while also benefiting from their employers and being able to afford a quality, comprehensive health plan. “This brings some healthy market dynamics to healthcare,” says Hooper. “It is important for improving the overall system.”

Take Command’s business model requires employers to sign up for a new way to buy health insurance, and Hooper says change management requires a lot of his company’s focus. There’s momentum toward the traditional group plan status quo, and it’s easy to pick one or two options and end the health insurance conversation. But as costs rise and margins are squeezed, employers are looking for other options. “We’re going to give employees some control, which will force health plans and providers to be responsive to employees,” Hooper says.

Hooper says Take Command has attracted interest from two types of employers. The first are small employers employing fewer than 10 people or micro-professional groups such as nonprofit organizations or accounting firms. Instead of purchasing a basic group plan, they create an HRA for their employees and allow them to shop on the ACA Marketplace. They have also had success in the mid-sized market with 50-500 employees. Given that the workforce is increasingly remote, it is becoming more difficult for these employers to choose a health plan with specific health networks that are not accessible to remote employees who do not live where the company is located. Take Command offers such employers another option that saves money and adds choice.

Hooper says the impact is significant. “Ninety percent of our small employers are offering benefits for the first time,” says Hooper. “This is great for them and the North Texas economy. “For larger employers, we have average savings in the 10 to 20 percent range.”

Jack Hooper: Federal Agent

Hooper’s name sounds like it belongs on a Netflix series, and the rest of his life wasn’t too far away. He began his professional career after graduating from Texas A&M University with an engineering degree. He was recruited to the CIA after meeting Robert Gates, former secretary of defense and CIA director and then-university president. After starting out as an energy analyst studying the economic impacts of foreign energy developments, he would reverse engineer those developments and figure out how foreign governments were building pipelines or other energy infrastructure projects.

He later became a counterterrorism financial analyst, where he served in a special forces unit in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East. The CIA and the military were not known to work well together, so their collaboration was unique. “My job was to chase the terrorists’ money. “This was my team when the government froze assets,” he says. “Sometimes we were chasing money in suitcases and had some real success.”

He later went to work for the FBI in Houston and founded the intelligence unit to combat domestic terrorism. He helped collect evidence, conducted surveillance, and worked to stop terrorist incidents before they occurred. The shift from collecting evidence of a crime to gathering intelligence before the crime was a shift in the FBI’s operations, which had traditionally focused on investigating crimes after they occurred. “It was fascinating to work with these experienced agents and try to help them see the difference in approaching things from an intelligence perspective,” Hooper says.

Hooper and his wife became pregnant with twins while working at the FBI, and this changed his perspective and career trajectory. Despite having no business experience, he applied to the MBA program and was accepted to the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. By the time he graduated, the ACA was up and running, creating new opportunities in a new health insurance market in which no one was an expert. It created fertile ground for a new graduate to establish a company.

Hooper says he learned a lot about craftsmanship and risk-taking that served him well as a healthcare CEO in a new market sector. “I was used to getting a lot of ‘no’ answers before I got a ‘yes’ answer,” says Hooper. “I had to understand why, persevere, and be persistent.”