Four posts across September instead of one on the day. Approve or change each. Nothing publishes without your written yes.
Post 1This weekDirect contracting had a panel to itself
On 1 September the Texas House Select Committee on Health Care Affordability took invited testimony across six panels.
Physicians. Insurers and coverage providers. Health systems. Pharmaceutical companies. Other solutions.
And one panel devoted entirely to direct contracting.
That last part is worth sitting with. Direct contracting was not a footnote inside somebody else's panel. It was its own conversation, in its own hour, in front of a committee whose entire charge is what care costs in Texas.
Our founder and board chairman David Balat was on it.
Post 2Mid monthWhere this company actually started
Before Direct Care Alliance, David Balat ran hospitals.
What he kept hearing from benefit advisors was that a direct contract with a hospital could not be done. He heard it enough times to stop believing it, and to start wondering whether the two sides were simply speaking different languages.
That is where this company began. Not with a theory about health care pricing. With a translation problem, between the people trying to buy care and the people trying to sell it.
He said it on the record, in front of a Texas House committee, on 1 September.
Drawn from the hearing record and held for your own wording before it runs.
Post 3When the record is publishedHear it in full
The Texas House Select Committee on Health Care Affordability has published the record from its 1 September hearing on health care affordability.
Panel Five is the one on direct contracting.
If you want to hear how this model gets explained to the people who write the rules, rather than how it gets pitched, it is worth the time.
Link in the first comment.
Holds until the committee posts the record. Nothing goes out before that.
Post 4Late monthWhat the committee asked
What a legislative committee asks tells you where a conversation is heading.
On 1 September the Texas House Select Committee on Health Care Affordability asked its panels who the customer in health care actually is.
It asked what happens to the price the day an independent practice is bought by a system.
It asked what an administrator owes the employer whose money it is spending.
And it asked one panel to send a written list of the obstacles standing in the way.
Not one of those is a pricing question. Every one of them is an ownership question.
Built from the committee's own questions, not from any panelist's answer.
No figure, claim or quotation runs in any of these unless it is already in the approved claims register. Every image carries alt text at the moment it is attached.