Texas Medical Association

He's one of your fellow Austin area Democrats.

dated his former chief of staff, later moved into a lobbying role at the Texas Medical Association.

There's been conflicting accounts of the timeline.

He recommended her for another taxpayer-funded staff position.

It is the amount that the insurance company has calculated for the purposes of determining how much the patient owes, okay? And it is supposed to be calculated based on the average in-network contracted rate today.

And We know from the lawsuits that the Texas Medical Association took on that the QPA is clearly not accurate.

And the very few audits that the federal government has done on the calculations of the QPA has shown that the insurance companies have proven that it's not accurate.

So what we want to do now is benchmark to a number that is clearly not accurate and And was really, again, designed to help figure out how much a patient has to owe because we have to figure out what's your copay deductible and coinsurance on this bill.

The organized medicine societies pass really good policies and have good best practices of medicine for how to take care of patients, but a lot of times Laws have to be passed and implemented to facilitate the actual practice of medicine.

And so once I realized that, I became more involved in the advocacy of legislative activities, particularly the Texas Medical Association.

In my career, I've gone through the leadership of the Texas Medical Association and am now currently on the board of trustees of the TMA, among other things.

But I work as a delegate to the American Medical Association for the American College of Radiology.

and I'm legislator chair for the Texas Radiological Society.

There are various moving parts that have been worked on.

And then, of course, there is one key part of the NSA and that was the failure to include enforcement of payment by the insurance companies when they lose the idr process

well i would be remiss dr childs if i didn't thank you and all the members of the texas medical association for mounting the litigation that you did over the rules that were first promulgated, as you were alluding to, by the prior administration in TMA1, TMA2, TMA3, and TMA4.

And then annually it's supposed to be updated for inflation.

There was actually litigation brought by the Texas Medical Association.

It's colloquially known as TMA-3.

It was the third lawsuit brought by the Texas Medical Association in relation to the Surprise Act.

And it was actually just very recently resolved, August of this year, that importantly found what a lot of physicians already knew.

There was a lot of opportunity for manipulation of that QPA calculation.

I could tell you a lot about James Talarico's girlfriend.

She used to be one of his staff members, and then he got her a job as a lobbyist for a group called Texas Medical Association.

You keep calling her, "her," and I'm not sure they're comfortable with that.

Well, whatever her gender is, or they's gender-

It does take a long, sustained level of advocacy to try to get an outcome that you are desiring.

I can give an example like in Texas, where we have the Texas Medical Association.

About twenty-five, thirty years ago, there was people that were doing a lot of venue shopping, which he was describing, like, um, people would frequently ha- send their cases down into what's called the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, uh, because that was where they found more friendlier juries.

So, so the TMA and its, and its physician members frequently went to the state capital to advocate for one cap on non-economic damages so they could, they could stop the jackpot justice and just really cover the true damages that someone gets from a, from a medical liability issue.

At the same time, there's a talk about team-based care.

And similar to the national associations, in Pennsylvania, we have taken the approach that physician-led, patient-centric, team-based care would probably afford the best access or best, uh, method to access care for patients.

And, uh, I'm sure the Texas Medical Association is, is thinking and acting along the same lines.

Yes.

They're unprecedented times, at least in the modern era.

And then we get the news yesterday, and having been a person who has battled on behalf of independent doctors and patients and the real science of medicine, somebody that the Texas Medical Association has gone after and tried to destroy, somebody that has spent a fortune on legal fees, somebody that's been called every bad name only to have everything you said come back full circle and the very people who trashed you now saying, oh yeah, by the way, ivermectin over the counter.

Having

been through everything you've been