WRITTEN TESTIMONY ON HB 2747
Submitted by Regan Parker, CEO, Association for Responsible Healthcare Investment (ARHI)
Texas House Public Health Committee | April 2025
Members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony regarding HB 2747.
My name is Regan Parker, and I am the CEO of the Association for Responsible Healthcare Investment (ARHI).
ARHI is a national coalition of organizations committed to strengthening healthcare through responsible private investment. Our members are deeply invested in the success of healthcare providers, the well-being of patients, and the resilience of the healthcare system as a whole.
At ARHI, we believe that when conducted responsibly, private investment can — and should — be a positive force in healthcare. Our members adhere to a set of core principles that guide all investment activity:
- Patient-centered care, ensuring that every investment expands access, improves quality, and delivers better outcomes for patients, especially in underserved and rural communities;
- Transparency and accountability, maintaining clear and ethical business practices, including governance disclosures and impacts on patient care;
- Preservation of clinical independence, safeguarding the ability of licensed healthcare professionals to make decisions in the best interests of their patients, free from inappropriate financial influence;
- Support for the healthcare workforce, including investments that promote fair compensation, training opportunities, and strategies to address burnout and shortages;
- Innovation and modernization, enabling the deployment of new technologies and care models that improve system efficiency and patient outcomes; and
- Long-term value creation, ensuring that investments strengthen the financial stability of healthcare organizations and create lasting benefits for communities.
These values reflect a commitment to building a healthcare system that is more equitable, more resilient, and more responsive to the needs of patients across Texas and the nation.
While we share the Committee’s interest in fostering a fair, competitive, and patient-centered healthcare marketplace, we must respectfully oppose HB 2747. As currently drafted, the bill would impose substantial new regulatory burdens on providers and investors without adequately targeting or fully understanding the root causes of rising healthcare costs in rural Texas.
Specifically, we are concerned that HB 2747 would:
- Impose significant compliance and reporting burdens on independent practices, physician groups, clinics, and small facilities — organizations that are often already operating on tight margins and serving high-need populations;
- Discourage investment in rural and underserved areas by creating uncertainty and new regulatory hurdles for prospective partners seeking to support healthcare expansion;
- Fail to meaningfully address the true drivers of rural healthcare costs, such as geographic monopolies and market distortions that limit patient choice and inflate prices; and
- Grant broad and undefined regulatory authority to the Attorney General’s office, without clear parameters or protections for sensitive, confidential business information, raising the risk of regulatory overreach.
Rather than achieving the intended goals of affordability and access, HB 2747 risks producing the opposite effect — making it harder for independent providers to thrive, harder for communities to attract investment, and ultimately harder for patients to access the care they need.
We respectfully urge policymakers to first understand more clearly the causes of the issues in Texas’ healthcare system, and to use those findings to create a data-driven approach to any proposed legislation. We encourage more research and dialogue to ensure that any legislation is focused on more effective, targeted strategies that directly address healthcare access and affordability challenges without imposing sweeping, costly burdens on responsible providers and innovators.
Such approaches could include:
- Promoting competition and innovation through incentive structures that reward quality and value;
- Expanding access to community-based healthcare models that bring services closer to patients in rural and underserved areas;
- Strengthening enforcement of existing laws against anti-competitive behavior, rather than layering broad new reporting requirements across the entire healthcare system.
Transparency and oversight are important tools in ensuring a healthy healthcare marketplace, but they must be deployed carefully and thoughtfully, using a data-driven approach. Oversight efforts that are too broad, too costly, or too disconnected from the real sources of cost pressures risk chilling investment, undermining innovation, and reducing patient access — particularly in the communities that can least afford it.
At ARHI, we are committed to working with policymakers to find solutions that uphold accountability while also protecting the essential pillars of access, innovation, and clinical autonomy that Texas patients and providers depend on. For these reasons, we respectfully urge the Committee to reconsider HB 2747 and to work collaboratively with healthcare stakeholders to craft more targeted, effective solutions. Texas deserves policies that strengthen its healthcare system without inadvertently creating barriers to investment, modernization, or patient-centered growth.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and for your leadership in working to improve healthcare for all Texans.
Respectfully submitted,
Regan Parker
CEO, Association for Responsible Healthcare Investment (ARHI)