Jeannette Makad joined NFP as a senior consultant of Group Benefits in February. With decades of experience in insurance and a decade in pharmacy benefits management, Jeannette combines her expertise with her volunteer outreach work to bring a multifaceted perspective to solving group benefits challenges and finding solutions for clients. In this interview, learn more about Jeannette and her experience at NFP, her approach to policy and challenges, and what she enjoys doing beyond our green NFP walls.
What is your role at NFP and what does a typical day look like?
My main focus is assisting our plan sponsors – our clients – strategically navigate their benefits programs. I sort through things like their objectives and their philosophy on offering group benefits, because for the most part in Canada, coverage isn't necessarily mandated — it is a true benefit that's part of a total compensation package. I help plan sponsors better understand their employee base or their plan member base so that they can provide benefits that are meaningful to their employees.
Why did you decide to make the move to NFP?
In speaking with friends who worked at NFP, I could tell that this was an environment that fostered collaboration and had that sort of caliber of peers. Now that I’m in the role, I see that we have people with a lot of experience in the industry in appropriate positions, and I’m learning tremendous things from them even though I’ve been in this business for many years. I feel like it’s been such a good fit for me, and I’m really happy.
How does your previous experience help you at NFP?
Well, I was plucked from a retail job and joined a call center role at an insurance company. Back then, we were very highly trained to handle most claim and administrative issues within the first five minutes of any call. This provided a tremendous foundation. When I talk about it now, it was like going to “group benefits university” because there was no university that you could go to and learn about group benefits.
As I grew within that role, I moved from health and dental into disability call claims. From there, I moved to underwriting, which is the financial aspect of managing plans. Everything just clicked for me, and I immediately fell in love with this career. From underwriting, I moved to administration, consulting and eventually to working in three pharmacy benefit management companies. Still, I’m always learning and that’s something that I really like about this industry.
What drives you to work in group benefits?
I have a passion for group benefits, so having a job where I can talk about group benefits all day, every day is, like, “Where do I sign?” At the core, I think what drives me is that we're ensuring the wellness of people. At the end of the day, if I had to describe it in three words, it's “wellness of people,” and that really resonates with me. That is my driving force.
From your perspective, what are the top three challenges facing Canadian business regarding group benefit programs?
In my opinion, there's only one major challenge, and that's guarding against risk on any plan. The three main risks I see are privatization of healthcare, healthcare utilization by our aging population, and increased fraud, waste and abuse of plans.
How can a company like NFP help with those challenges?
Our carries do have a lot of programs and controls in place — but they're not perfect. They're being innovative in developing their AI, in developing algorithms that can identify different utilization patterns, and in putting controls in place to prevent fraud and abuse. Our part to play in that is we review the data that comes out of the carriers to ensure that everything's above board.
I also really appreciate that here at NFP, we take a team approach to helping our clients. With a deep understanding of how public and private plans coordinate, we can help build meaningful and sustainable plans for our coverage and layer in ancillary programs to help support the employees of our clients.
Canadian policy has recently set out to implement dental and pharmacare plans. How does Canadian policy affect your work?
For the most part, public plans that eventually take shape are put in place to cover those who do not already have coverage or who may need top-up coverage to an already existing plan. That does not necessarily impact us because we don't cover people who don't have coverage. That said, poorly thought-out or implemented public plans can negatively impact private plans in many ways if there's not a streamlined method of benefits coordination.
The example of that is with the pharmacare plans to roll out coverage for the diabetes drugs – which only covers a select number of drugs – if we don't have a well-thought-out and communicated diabetes treatment plan available on a public level, that could leave a lot of people who currently have coverage without coverage because plan sponsors will see that as an easy fix to save some money. So that's where we're kind of at the mercy of plans that are being tabled. That's going to translate into admin expenses down the road and impact rates. The programs themselves might not have an impact, but there is indirect impact down the road.
At the end of the day, public and private plans should be harmonized towards the end goal of ensuring that Canadians have access to and coverage for the treatments and services they require to lead healthy lives.
What approach would you suggest for pharmacare to meet the needs of Canadians who currently fall into coverage gaps?
First, we need a study of precisely what the problem is that we're trying to solve and understand what gaps we are trying to fill here.
Second, we'd benefit from having a consolidated national drug agency that includes provincial delegates in that agency. This would be an ongoing national committee that's comprised of stakeholder representatives and experts, including representatives from patient advocacy groups with lived experience who can speak to the difficulties of navigating our fractured drug programs.
Third, I'd like to see drugs for rare diseases removed from public or private plans and pooled across the nation because those are the million-dollar drugs — and it's 1% of the population that's accounting for 20% of drug expenses because they require these life-changing drugs.
What is your future vision for the group benefits landscape in Canada?
I would like to see a lot more collaboration between public and private plans. Beyond that, I'm really excited that in the Canadian landscape we're seeing a more holistic approach to managing our health expenses. So even from a chronic disease state, we're not targeting just heart disease and just diabetes. We're looking at a more cohesive comorbidity approach to things like cardiovascular disease and how it works with diabetes and weight management and how it works with all of these other chronic pieces. I'm loving how far we've come with mental health and wellness. That started in the late ’90s, and I feel like the pandemic kind of gave us that last final push that we needed for just general acceptance.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I am most proud of my contributions as a volunteer within my community, and I sit on a couple of boards and committees for not-for-profit organizations that support it. And I am most proud to be a part of Sanguen Health Centre. They have not only done some amazing things to meet the needs of those living with Hepatitis C in our community, but they have also done so much community education in harm reduction and to help reduce the stigma of addiction.
Outside of my volunteering, I enjoy gardening, spending time with my Shih Tzu, Gideon, and trying to refinish my old house.