More women take top jobs at health insurers

One expert says leaders need to understand what’s important at all levels.

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — Women typically treat their kids’ coughs and runny noses, schedule regular trips to the doctor’s office and are the family’s key decision-maker on health care issues.

Now they’re moving into the executive suites of health insurers, a business long dominated by men.

Later this year, Patricia Hemingway Hall, 55, will be the first woman to run Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp., the nation’s fourth-largest health insurance company with more than 12 million members. The chief executive position doesn’t involve delivering babies or emptying bedpans, which she did earlier in her career as a nurse, but that experience will shape her relationships with medical-care providers.

Hemingway Hall joins Angela Braly, 46, who seven months ago became chief executive at WellPoint Inc., the nation’s largest health insurer with 35 million health plan subscribers.

“I do think that being a woman and a mother is an advantage in this industry, because about 70 percent of all health care decisions are made by women,” said Braly, a mother of three children.

It also makes good business sense.

“If insurers want to appeal to the decision-makers both in the home, at the employer and within the consulting environment, they need to have leadership that understands what is important to them at all levels,” said Donna DeFrank, who headed Chicago regional health insurance operations for health care companies Cigna Corp. and WellPoint’s Unicare Illinois subsidiary before starting her own consulting business.

Providers of medical care and advocacy groups increasingly are marketing specifically to women.

“Clearly, our messaging and outreach and advertising is focused on the woman who is the boomer or the 40-plus woman whether she be African-American or Hispanic or single or married with children,” said Roba Whiteley, executive director of Together Rx Access, which provides drug discount cards to the uninsured.

While Braly’s and Hemingway Hall’s predecessors get high marks for financial stewardship, guiding both plans through acquisitions and rapid growth, the future may require that and a more diplomatic skill set given the political battles ahead. Both have been more involved in legislative public affairs, something the industry is pushing their CEOs to do more aggressively.

“Because of our political situation, our members understand that we must be out in the public talking about our value proposition,” said Karen Ignagni, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group and lobby.

In Braly, for example, WellPoint’s board selected an executive well versed in corporate communications and government relations. She had been the company’s general counsel before being elevated to the top job. Her predecessor, Larry Glasscock, had a banking background before moving to the health care industry in the 1990s, joining Anthem Inc. in 1998 and helped guide its merger with WellPoint in 2004.

“Historically, the leadership positions in multiline insurers were awarded to men who advanced from the finance, actuarial and sales ranks,” DeFrank said.

“The insurance industry and the business environment are much more complex and multifaceted now than in previous decades and there was a lag in recognizing that this new environment required a potentially different and broader skill set. Today, the selection trend indicates that may be changing,” DeFrank said.

Outgoing Health Care Service boss Raymond McCaskey, 64, started his career at the insurer, rising from his first job at the company in 1976 as an associate actuary at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.

In contrast, Hemingway Hall started her health care career as an intensive-care-unit nurse after graduating from Michigan State University in 1975. She continued working as a nurse while earning her master’s degree in public health, planning and administration at the University of Michigan, where she graduated in 1979.

Her experience as a clinician offers a unique perspective, she said.

“You see things that most people don’t see in their lives,” Hemingway Hall said in a recent interview. “It is a different perspective at the point where we have delivered the service. I have emptied bedpans.”