Jack Hooper jokes that he used to be cool and now sells insurance. While his early days as an analyst with the CIA and as a field intelligence agent with the FBI might make great fodder for a TV thriller, his company’s influence on smaller employers and transformation of the healthcare industry may have a more lasting impact than his career as a federal agent.
Hooper founded Dallas-based Take Command Health, which serves small employers who want to subsidize their employees’ health insurance but don’t have the size or margin for a traditional group health plan. The company helps employers launch a product created in the wake of the Affordable Healthcare Act called the individual coverage Health Reimbursement Account (HRA), which allows employers to reimburse employees for medical expenses like premiums, out-of-pocket costs, copayments, and deductibles. It differs from a health savings account in that the HRA funds are limited to employees enrolled in an individual health plan purchased through the ACA Marketplace. Hooper calls the 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 through the process, and handling the regulatory requirements in administering the HRA. The company supports 6,000 employer clients, with 120 full-time workers and 60 more on a part-time basis.
Hooper says he always asks employers a fundamental question: Should they be responsible for their employees’ healthcare? Most answer “no.” However, when organizations purchase a group plan, they make themselves accountable for their employees’ healthcare costs. The HRA allows employees to shop for what’s best for them while still benefiting from their employer and being able to afford a quality comprehensive health plan. “It brings a little bit of healthy market dynamics to healthcare,” Hooper says. “It’s important for improving the overall system.”
Take Command’s business model, which requires employers to sign up for a new way to buy health insurance, and Hooper says change management requires much of his company’s focus. There is momentum toward the status quo of the traditional group plan, and it is easy to pick one or two options and be done with the health insurance conversation. But employers are looking for other options as costs go up and squeeze margins. “We’re going to give the employees a little bit of control, which forces the health plans and the providers to be responsive to the employee,” Hooper says.
Hooper says Take Command has found traction among two types of employers. First are the smaller employers or micro-professional groups like nonprofits or accounting firms that employ fewer than 10 people. Rather than purchase a bare-bones group plan, they create an HRA for their employees and allow them to shop on the ACA Marketplace. They have also seen success in the mid-market with 50-500 employees. With an increasingly remote workforce, it is more difficult for these employers to pick a health plan with specific health networks that may not be accessible to remote employees who don’t live where the company is based. Take Command gives these types of employers another option that saves money and adds choice.
The impact, Hooper says, has been substantial. “Ninety percent of our small employers are offering benefits for the first time,” Hooper says. “That’s great for them and the North Texas economy. For the larger employers, we have an average savings in the 10 to 20 percent range.”
Jack Hooper: Federal Agent
Hooper’s name sounds like it belongs in a Netflix series, and the rest of his life wasn’t far off. 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, the former secretary of defense and CIA director who was then the university president. Beginning as an energy analyst who studied the economic impact of foreign energy developments, he would later reverse engineer those developments and figure out how foreign governments built pipelines or other energy infrastructure projects.
Later, he became a counterterrorism finance analyst, where he was embedded with a special forces unit in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East. The CIA and military weren’t known for working well together, so the collaboration was unique. “My job was to chase terrorist money. When the government freezes assets, that was my team,” he says. “At times, we were chasing money in suitcases and had some real successes.”
He later transitioned to work for the FBI in Houston and set up its intelligence unit to fight terrorism domestically. He helped gather evidence, performed surveillance, and worked toward stopping terrorist incidents before they happened. The shift from gathering evidence of a crime to collecting intelligence ahead of a crime was a change of operations for the FBI, which is traditionally focused on investigating crimes after they happen. “It was fascinating working with these seasoned agents and trying to help them see the difference in how to approach things from an intelligence point of view,” Hooper says.
While working with the FBI, Hooper and his wife became pregnant with twins, which changed his outlook and career trajectory. Though he lacked business experience, he applied for an MBA and was accepted into the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. When he graduated, the ACA was up and running, creating new opportunities in a new health insurance market where no one had any expertise. For a recent graduate, it made for fertile ground to start a company.
Hooper says he learned much about tradecraft and risk-taking, which have served him well as a healthcare CEO in a new market sector. “I was used to getting a lot of ‘no’s before I got a ‘yes,’” Hooper says. “I had to understand the why, persevere, and be persistent.”
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