We are the people who read the fine print so your family never has to find it the hard way.
Shepherd Health Group is an independent insurance agency. No carrier owns our recommendation, no quota decides what we put in front of you, and no household leaves a conversation with us less clear than when it started.
It started with a bill that did not add up.
Our founder, Trace O’Grady, was not in this business when it began. He was a customer, writing a check every month for a plan he had never really been walked through, quietly certain he was paying too much and completely unable to get a straight answer about what he was actually buying. Every call ended the same way: a script, a deflection, and a renewal notice a few months later.
So he got licensed, mostly to answer his own question. And from the inside the picture got clear fast. Most plans are assembled around what a carrier wants to sell and what pays the agent, not around what protects the family sitting across the table.
The routine care gets dressed up front and center, because that is the part a family can picture. The catastrophic protection, the part that quietly decides whether one bad year wipes out a household, gets left thin, because nobody shops hard for what they hope never happens.
Shepherd Health Group exists to reverse that order. We build the wall first. We fill the gaps on purpose. We price the ordinary care honestly. And we say the true thing even when the true thing costs us the sale.
Captive agents have one shelf. We have the whole store.
The word gets used loosely, so here is the practical version of it.
No single carrier
A captive agent can only recommend what their company sells, which means the answer to “what is best for you” is decided before you speak. We hold appointments with multiple carriers, so the comparison is real.
Structure before product
We will not name a plan until we have walked you through how coverage is built and where households actually get hurt. If you cannot explain your own plan back to us, we have not finished.
The unprofitable answer
Sometimes the right advice is keep what you have, or wait, or take the employer plan you were about to drop. We give that answer plainly. It is the only way the rest of our advice is worth anything.
Insurance has one real job.
To keep a hard season from turning into financial ruin. That is it. It was never meant to nickel and dime a family over care they could comfortably handle themselves, and it was never meant to be so complicated that the person paying for it cannot tell you what it does.
You should be able to keep your own doctors. Your plan should reflect your household, your budget, and your values rather than an underwriting category. And the person explaining it to you should answer to you.
We measure ourselves on one thing: whether the family across the table can explain their own coverage confidently a year later. Not whether they bought.
What you can hold us to
- We name the trade-off in every recommendation, not just the upside.
- We identify a health share as a non-insurance option every single time.
- We never sell or share your information.
- One conversation, then the decision is yours on your timeline.
This is not a marketing premise. It is the measured state of coverage.
We did not invent the gap we talk about. It shows up in every national survey of what families are carrying and what it leaves them exposed to.
About 28.0 million people in the United States were uninsured in 2025. Among working-age adults 18 to 64, the figure is 11.6 percent.
Nearly one in four adults who carried coverage all year still faced out-of-pocket costs or deductibles high enough relative to income to count as underinsured. Fifty-seven percent of them went without needed care because of cost.
More than half of Marketplace enrollees rate what they pay each month as fair or poor value. Among people with employer coverage, 46 percent say the same.
Every figure on this page is drawn from a named public source and dated. Percentages describe national survey populations, not any individual household, and nothing here predicts what your own coverage will cost or cover.
The ground moved under households this year.
Deductible and Marketplace figures: KFF analysis of 2026 ACA Marketplace data, 2026. Employer premiums: KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, 2025. Emergency savings: Bankrate Emergency Savings Report, surveyed December 2025. Medical debt: Commonwealth Fund 2024 Biennial Health Insurance Survey.
Thirty minutes, and you will know where you stand.
No cost, no obligation, and a straight answer at the end of it — including if that answer is to keep exactly what you have.
Thirty minutes. Nothing to sign. Your information is never sold.