Dutch Rojas
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dutch Rojas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I have to tell you, this is the greatest introduction I've ever had. That was so generous and so kind. I feel like saying all those things back to you. You're the reason I met Hayek, and then you were the reason I met Keith Smith. And so those are two very influential people. One, because I'm very involved with overseas missions, building surgery centers for people that don't have anything.
I love that. It's the thing that really makes my heart happy. And then Keith Smith really helped me propel Price Transparency. And so those two things, you were responsible for the introduction of both of those people, so I'm forever grateful.
Yeah. So Keith Smith's really the father of price transparency. He made it so that not only individuals or consumers could shop and compare prices on an array of healthcare treatments and services, but he also allowed employers to do the first direct contracts. Meaning you have a plan that's a PPO. He allowed you to build a tier one network on top of that. So you had first dollar coverage.
And in the age of high deductibles, that was a big deal. And he kind of exposed price discovery, which for me as a capitalist is the number one thing. It's the number one signal I use to determine the value of a good or service. And so – Keith is entirely responsible for starting that movement.
I know there were people probably earlier than him, but he took his – I've been to his surgery center many times. He took his surgery center. He took his 214 partners, and he allowed them to do bundled prices, meaning like – anesthesia, facility fee, pro fee, and any other DME, implant fee, put it together as one price and offer that to the community. He does not accept network rates.
He doesn't participate in any carrier rate transactions. And he was the first to do it. He started in 97. I met him around 2008. And one of the first conferences I ever saw him speak at was yours. He was on a Saturday and he was in the main room at the Swiss Hotel. And I still remember there being like seven people in the conference room and I was at the front.
And, you know, it was life changing for me. It was absolutely life changing for me that someone would introduce these types of ideas into a place where we are largely dominated by third third party payers. Now, Andrew's a whole – I mean, you had him as a keynote speaker for how many years at Becker's ASC?
So I first saw him I think in 2008 or 2009 at the first Becker's conference I ever went to. You introduced me to him, and he was really the first person that took – I'd owned independent ASCs by then. I'd helped develop them, worked with independent physicians around the country. But I think in 2008, I was maybe up to like 27 or 28 ASCs. I'd never been exposed to the –
In fact, before I went to your conference, I didn't even know that it was an industry. Back then, doctors would yell at me and say, I can't believe you're an accountant and a business guy. Why are you building these and why are you helping doctors extract money from a system when the money needs to go to the health systems?
I remember having conversations with Andrew about doing total joints in an outpatient area. People were very upset that we would even propose these things or talk about them. He was really the first guy in private equity to understand private equity and use it the right way. He was the first one to partner with Optum. I mean, he was kind of a first in so many ways, and he was young.
I mean, when I met him, he was in maybe his late 30s, early 40s. He's still, I mean, I don't know how old he is now, 52, 54 or something. I mean, he's a young guy. And he was really the first visionary I met that really changed the landscape. I mean, he took SCA from very little to very big very quickly. And he spoke the language of independent physicians, and he truly was a partner to them.
And that was always the difference. Business guys in my world were always like, if you're a business person, then you're anti-physician. And I was like, no, no, no, we don't have to be that way. If we want to make the world better and we want to make – healthcare better for people, then we're going to have to figure out how to trust each other and work together, right?
We'll set up systems of accountability. We'll use great operating agreements and we'll kind of put those together and then we'll do the right things. And Scott was certainly a leader in that. And then of course, One World Surgical. I mean, what a fantastic organization. And then he worked at Optum Ventures. I mean, he's just been a great person to know and watch.
And when I tell young people about him, I'm like, look, you're not going to find much information about this guy, but like, Find people like him. He is an inspiration and he ought to be followed. Like you want you want you want to walk in the footsteps of a great person. He's there and he's super humble. He'll never say, oh, yeah, I did all this. Like, he's just not like that.
He's like, well, it's it's it's really been the great people around me. I mean, he's just such an effective leader. I mean, I think the guy's great.
Number one is we are running a – we started a consulting agency for physician-owned hospitals and large private practices. There are so many ideas, right? I went to a small school called Cambridge in the UK. And, you know, there's so many business ideas that haven't trickulated down to that level, right? What we categorize as the mid-markets, right?
You've got very sophisticated strategies within health systems, certainly PE-backed health systems you've got very highly sophisticated, but you don't have that level of sophistication down to the level I like. The surgery center partners, the large ortho practices, the physician-owned hospital world, you just don't see it.
And so one of the things we started working on was we built our very first captive a year ago March. So we built our first captive to do some property and casualty lines and to help physicians understand that they don't have to pay premiums every year if they understand how captives work and the captive strategies. Right.
So I started bringing in friends from EY and Accenture and a bunch of other kind of consulting houses and saying to these docs, listen, you're already paying all these fees out of OPEX. Let me show you how to turn an expense using some financial engineering into assets.
So this is something that really excites me because now we're teaching docs the power of the balance sheet when generally speaking, this doesn't go for everyone, they've been focused on just being a pass-through entity. Like I made $100,000 this month, I'm going to take it all.
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