Jim Rodriguez

Making healthcare prices transparent is a good idea. Patients should be able to find out what care will cost before receiving it. Employers paying for health benefits deserve to know what their money is buying. And providers should have to explain why their prices are higher than those of comparable facilities. But there is a

A recent article from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health asks a question that deserves far more attention: Nonprofit hospitals receive billions of dollars in tax exemptions every year. What are their communities actually getting in return? The Johns Hopkins article, “Nonprofit Hospitals Get Billions in Tax Breaks. What Do Their Communities Get

Mental health has become one of the most important healthcare issues facing Texas families and employers. Anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, and other behavioral health conditions affect our workplaces, families, schools, and communities.  Yet there is an important protection available to Texans that surprisingly few people seem to know about:  Mental health and substance use

Every year I see the same scenario play out. A small business owner receives a renewal notice in late October or November showing another significant increase in health insurance premiums. With only a few weeks before the plan renews, they are forced to make a difficult decision: absorb the higher costs, shift more of the

Every year, headlines focus on how many Americans selected an Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace plan during Open Enrollment. While those numbers are important, they tell only part of the story. The real measure of success is not how many people clicked “Enroll.” It is how many actually paid their premiums, maintained coverage, and remained

The recent hearings and discussions from the Texas Select Committee on Health Care Reform revealed something important about the future of healthcare in Texas: policymakers are beginning to recognize that healthcare affordability is not simply an insurer problem or a provider problem. It is a systemic problem. For years, much of the public debate around

As we move through 2026, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) market is going through a noticeable reset. After a few years of expanded federal subsidies that made coverage more affordable, those extra savings expired at the end of 2025, and people are starting to feel it. Even with those changes, enrollment hasn’t dropped as sharply

If you’ve been paying attention to the small group health insurance market, you know something isn’t quite right. Premiums continue to rise.Carrier participation is shrinking.And more small employers are asking a difficult question: “Can we still afford to offer health insurance at all?” For many, the answer is becoming no, or at least, not in

Two recent pieces, BenefitsPRO’s coverage of the 2027 ACA draft rules potentially pushing small firms toward the individual market and HealthDay’s headline that new rules could allow very high deductibles (up to $31,000 for families)are getting framed mostly as a consumer-cost story. But there’s another angle worth emphasizing: these changes contain real, market-friendly upsides if policymakers are honest about what actually drives premiums, i.e., benefit mandates, regulatory expansion, and

Healthcare reform is back on the national stage—again. The Trump administration has released a broad healthcare framework that’s being marketed as a “Great Healthcare Plan.” It’s not a full bill yet, and many details are still vague, but the direction is clear: this plan isn’t about expanding traditional insurance coverage. It’s about changing how people pay