Joel opened the agency in 2009 because the call center had asked him to retire-by-phone seventeen consecutive over-65 clients in a quarter. Patricia joined a year later. We have grown from a folding card table in a borrowed office to a renovated 1920s cottage on Charlotte Street with two more licensed agents and roughly 1,800 Medicare clients across western North Carolina.
We are an independent Medicare-specialist insurance agency. That phrase is doing real work in this sentence: independent means we do not work for any one carrier; Medicare-specialist means we do not write personal auto, home, or commercial — only Medicare and the Medicare-adjacent lines (Part D, Dental-Vision-Hearing, Hospital Indemnity, Final Expense Life) and a small ACA Marketplace book for clients between early retirement and 65. We chose specialty because the rules around Medicare are intricate, the regulations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are particular, and we wanted to be very good at the conversation rather than passably-good at a dozen lines.
What follows is a longer-than-usual "about" page because Medicare is a longer-than-usual purchase. If you are about to put your health insurance for the rest of your life in someone's hands, you probably want to know who they are.
Joel Northbrook, RHU
Founder · NABIP National Member
Joel grew up in Hickory, North Carolina and graduated from NC State University with a BS in Business in 1989. He spent the first fourteen years of his career at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, working his way from a customer-service desk in Durham to senior account manager for the western region. Toward the end of that run he was managing a portfolio of mid-sized employer groups headquartered in Asheville and Hendersonville, which is how he came to know the city well enough to live here.
In 2009 he resigned. The proximate reason was a quarter in which the call center had asked him to retire-by-phone seventeen consecutive over-65 group members from their employer plans into individual Medicare plans. The scripts were efficient. They were not what he would have said sitting across a table. He opened Northbrook Senior Insurance Advisors three months later out of a borrowed office above the old Charlotte Street Pharmacy with a folding card table and a single landline.
He earned the Registered Health Underwriter (RHU) designation in 2011, completes AHIP recertification annually, and has been a continuously-paid NABIP National Member since 2012. He sits on the NABIP North Carolina Chapter education committee and has been quoted in regional Senior Insurance Information Program materials four times since 2018.
Joel does most of the new-client conversations at the agency himself. He keeps Wednesday afternoons clear for clients turning 65 and Fridays clear for the Hendersonville drive.
Patricia Northbrook
ACA-Certified Marketplace Assistor
Patricia spent her career before insurance in nonprofit grants administration — first with a community-foundation in Charlotte, later with a regional arts council based in Asheville. The skill she carried over was the skill of explaining a complicated benefit-rules-document to someone who had never seen one before. It turned out to be the right skill for Medicare and for the Affordable Care Act, which arrived a year after Joel opened the agency.
Patricia is a CMS-Certified Marketplace Assistor, recertified annually since 2014. She runs the under-65 ACA book — clients who retired early, clients who left employer insurance, self-employed clients, COBRA-bridge clients waiting out the gap to 65. Most of these clients become Joel's Medicare clients five or ten years later. The relationship begins when they retire early; it continues through 65 and beyond.
During AEP each fall Patricia also handles the rush — every fourth October-November appointment is one of hers, and she is the one who answers the phone when it rings after 4 p.m.
Hannah Lin
Licensed Health Agent · Since 2018
Hannah is from Charlotte, attended UNC-Asheville (BA in Public Health, 2014), and worked for four years at a community-health nonprofit in West Asheville before crossing into insurance in 2018. She is licensed in North Carolina, completes AHIP annually, and is the agent of choice for the Asheville Chinese-speaking community — her Mandarin and Cantonese are conversational, and parents are routinely referred to her by their adult children for the Medicare conversation.
Hannah handles a meaningful share of new-to-Medicare appointments and most of the Saturday-during-AEP rush. She has a quiet style — long pauses, careful questions, a calm demeanor across a table — that is unusually well-suited to clients who are bewildered.
Robert Connelly
Licensed Health Agent · Since 2022
Robert spent thirty-one years teaching public-school history in Buncombe County — at Reynolds High School for the bulk of that, with a four-year stretch at Owen High in the early 2000s. He retired in 2021 and, in his words, "decided I wanted to do something that lets me sit with neighbors at a table and help them think." He earned his life and health licenses in early 2022 and joined the agency that spring.
Robert handles roughly a third of our annual reviews, takes most of the calls that come in during school holidays (when the rest of us are stretched), and is the one our older clients ask for by name because he is roughly their age and remembers their high-school principals. He has not yet pursued the RHU, but he reads the Medicare & You handbook every year cover to cover.
We are not a high-volume agency. We see roughly six to eight new prospects a week. Most of them become clients, and most of those clients stay with us for ten, twelve, fifteen years. We renew with them every fall during AEP whether or not anything changes — because the conversation is the work.
— Joel Northbrook, NABIP Member Spotlight, October 2024
Recognition
Awards · Memberships · Continuing Education- Memberships
- NABIP National Member since 2012
- NABIP North Carolina Chapter member
- Trusted Choice independent-agent network
- NC Senior Insurance Information Program partner since 2014
- Better Business Bureau A+ accredited since 2010
- Carrier recognition
- UnitedHealthcare Achiever Club 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022
- Humana Heritage Club 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
- Mutual of Omaha Top Producer (NC region) 2019, 2021, 2023
- Aetna SilverScript Top Producer 2020, 2022
- Continuing education
- AHIP Medicare Certification — annual, all four agents
- Joel: NC, SC, TN, VA, GA non-resident licenses (current)
- Patricia: CMS ACA Marketplace Assistor recertification — annual since 2014
What we believe about the conversation
You should never feel rushed. The first conversation should be long enough to actually do the work — usually 45 minutes, sometimes 75 if there are multiple specialists across multiple health systems to map. The agent should ask about your medications, your doctors, your travel pattern, and what your plan-day looks like before recommending anything. The agent should be willing to tell you that your current plan is the right plan for you, when that is true, even though it earns the agency nothing.
We send a paper folder home with every new client containing: a copy of the application, a copy of the enrollment confirmation, the carrier's contact information, our direct lines, and a calendar reminder to come back for an Annual Enrollment Period review every October. Most of our clients keep that folder in the same place they keep their Social Security card. Most of them come back.