Tomorrow's Bread Today
Mission

 Sponsored Health Care Program

Patient / Physician Cooperation

In Complete Care PPC patients and physicians cooperate with each other to relieve pain and suffering while not wasting time or resources.

1. The Basic Membership in the Patient Association

TBT has gathered all of the ancillary resources available throughout the nation and made them economical and easily used by patients, their families, and their providers of care.

1. Laboratory tests from Quest Diagnostics at no copay, deductible, or coinsurance cost.

2. Prescription drugs through Majic Pill.

3. Dental, vision, hearing through Doc Wellbee at 50% to 70% discount in every State.

4. Telemedicine from Teladoc 24 hours a day 365 days a year from board certified physicians in every State with no copayment.

5. Legal defense from Schulte Law against balance billing claims by out-of-network hospitals and clinics.

6. Direct monthly payment plans with both primary care and specialist physicians.

7. Patient advocacy from Health Care Association TPA to find the right care at the right price for each patient.

8. The underlying insurance – stop loss is from Odyssey Re.

Remove the fear of major medical expenses by buying basic health care and stop loss insurance through TBT Association Health Plan with no pre-existing conditions exclusions at wholesale prices.

No group health plan in the United States competes with this program in benefits or cost.

Contact: Don McCormick 832-599-8449 or email donmcco@tbt.org

 Service Providers

• Health Care Association TPA. The TPA offers association group health plans for employers and subscription health plans for individuals. They have a proven model of lowering health care costs by combining the advantages of telemedicine, a robust pharmacy program, and a growing network of physicians. They do this by fixed rate direct contracting and expanding relationships with additional provider networks.

• Quest Diagnostics. An American clinical laboratory and Fortune 500 company, Quest operates in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Brazil. Quest also maintains collaborative agreements with various hospitals and clinics across the globe.

• Teladoc. Teladoc Health was founded on a simple, yet revolutionary idea: that everyone should have access to the best healthcare, anywhere in the world on their terms. Today, we’re delivering on our mission by providing whole-person virtual care that includes primary care, mental health, chronic condition management and more.

• Schulte Law. Bret A. Schulte, J.D. graduated from Yale and Ohio State Moritz College of Law, has been in practice 22 years, specializes in real estate and health care law. His offices are in Houston, Texas.

• TBT Patient Association

  • TBT provides the group health plans backed by a national association for inpatient and outpatient services.

  • TBT provides the $50K stop loss backed by an A Excellent A.M Best Rated national reinsurance provider.

 Donald H. McCormick

A Public Record and Personal History

There are many people named Donald or Don McCormick on the Internet. I am Donald H. McCormick, usually known as Don McCormick, associated for many years with Tomorrow's Bread Today, Patient Physician Cooperative, and Physicians ACO in Texas.

I have prepared this page because Internet searches increasingly assemble information about people from unrelated databases, old newspaper stories, government records, social media, books, court cases, and commercial background services. Some of the information about me is accurate. Some is incomplete or misleading. Some belongs to entirely different people named Donald McCormick.

This is an attempt to provide enough history and context for anyone interested in knowing who I actually am and what I have done.

Health Care and Cooperative Economics

Most of my professional life has involved health care, physician organizations, insurance, and cooperative economics.

I worked in health insurance and managed care before turning increasingly toward organizations in which patients and physicians could deal more directly with one another. Over the years I worked with HMOs, PPOs, IPAs, physician groups, accountable care organizations, charitable clinics, hospitals, and patient-physician cooperatives.

The central question behind much of that work has remained remarkably constant:

Can patients, physicians, families, and communities cooperate directly to obtain better care at a lower total cost than systems dominated by institutional intermediaries?

I have spent much of my adult life trying to answer that question in practice rather than merely arguing about it.

Tomorrow's Bread Today

The Order of Love, Peace, Truth, Tolerance, and Cooperation was established in Texas in 1994 and operates as Tomorrow's Bread Today (TBT). It is a tax-exempt charitable and religious organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

I have served TBT in several capacities, including Minister, trustee, and chief executive.

Our understanding of charity has never been limited to giving things away. We have tried to help people cooperate in meeting ordinary human needs. TBT's work has consequently included health care, housing, food, transportation, charitable assistance, and cooperative community organization.

That work has included successes, experiments, and failures. We think all three are useful if we learn from them.

Working With Physicians

My work with physicians considerably predates Patient Physician Cooperative.

In 1994, associates and I established MRSB Ltd., a physician-group management company. By 2008, the Houston Chronicle reported that MRSB worked with approximately 560 physicians in the Houston area.

I was also involved in efforts to develop physician-supported hospitals.

In 2001, contemporary newspaper reporting identified me as director of Tomorrow's Bread Today and as the person selected to head a proposed hospital development in Pearland, Texas. The proposed development included a 105-bed hospital, medical offices, and equipment representing an investment of tens of millions of dollars.

Part of the hospital's revenues was intended to help provide health care for people who could not afford insurance.

A later Pearland effort included development of an approximately $800,000 free clinic, designed to accommodate three physicians and potentially serve as many as 120 patients a day.

Not every hospital project we attempted became a hospital. That is part of the history too.

Patient Physician Cooperative

Experience with charity care led us to an important observation.

People without conventional insurance were often willing to contribute modest amounts regularly if doing so gave them dependable access to physicians. At the same time, physicians could sometimes receive more from a small direct payment than remained after the administrative expense involved in conventional third-party payment.

That experience contributed to the development of Patient Physician Cooperative (PPC).

Independent reporting by YES! Magazine described me as a former health-insurance executive who founded the Houston Patient/Physician Cooperative in 2005. At the time of that report, PPC had approximately 60 participating clinics, and versions of the model had appeared outside Houston.

The purpose was not to create another insurance company.

It was to reduce the administrative and financial distance between the patient and the people actually providing care.

That remains an important part of TBT's work.

Physicians ACO and Medicare

In 2012, I served as President of Physicians ACO, LLC, in the Greater Houston area.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services identified Physicians ACO as one of the Accountable Care Organizations entering the Medicare Shared Savings Program that year. CMS described it as a Houston network of individual practices involving approximately 75 physicians.

Physicians ACO subsequently renewed its participation. In all, we participated in the Medicare Shared Savings Program for approximately seven years.

The purpose of an ACO was particularly compatible with what we had already been trying to accomplish: coordinate care, improve quality, and reduce unnecessary expenditure.

Physicians ACO generated substantial Medicare savings. Publicly available federal performance information documents tens of millions of dollars in savings during its early performance years alone.

There was also a serious dispute with the government.

During the initial agreement period, Physicians ACO maintained that a malfunction in the government contractor's reporting system prevented us from completing a required quality-data submission. CMS denied the associated shared-savings payment.

We believed the lost payment was approximately $5 million.

Physicians ACO challenged the CMS decision and subsequently sued the technology contractor. We did not prevail.

Those cases sometimes appear prominently in Internet searches. They were not criminal proceedings, fraud prosecutions, or disciplinary proceedings against me or Physicians ACO. PACO was the plaintiff seeking relief.

I continue to believe that the government treated us unjustly in that dispute. That is my opinion, and the court records are public so that anyone interested can reach a different conclusion.

What is sometimes lost in searches for the litigation is what happened afterward.

Physicians ACO continued participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program, renewed its participation, and received shared-savings payments in subsequent years. We ultimately ceased participation after the number of Medicare beneficiaries attributed to the ACO fell below the program's required threshold of 5,000 beneficiaries.

The lawsuit was therefore one episode in a much longer ACO history, not the end of the organization because of misconduct or poor performance.

The Dallas Hospital Project

Years later, Tomorrow's Bread Today became involved with the abandoned former Tri-City Hospital property on Scyene Road in Dallas.

The hospital had been vacant for many years. TBT and its donors attempted to rehabilitate the existing concrete-and-steel structure and develop a charitable hospital.

We devoted substantial resources to the effort.

Approximately $2 million was actually paid to outside vendors, while approximately another $1.5 million in architectural, construction, and professional services was contributed or written off as donations.

An appraisal obtained for the project valued the existing hospital property substantially above the value of the cleared land and contemplated a much larger value following successful redevelopment.

TBT pursued restoration rather than demolition.

The project ultimately failed.

TBT and the City of Dallas disagreed about the future of the property. After TBT and its donors decided to abandon the charitable hospital effort and were prepared to relinquish the property, a local developer pursued a housing redevelopment. An arrangement contemplated repayment to donors if that development succeeded.

That effort also encountered difficulties, and the former hospital building was ultimately demolished in 2025.

Some details concerning the later transaction are contained in private agreements subject to confidentiality obligations. They are therefore intentionally not published here.

This history is important when looking at TBT's financial statements. The large hospital asset appearing during this period and disappearing from later statements was associated with this project and its disposition. It was not an unexplained disappearance of charitable assets.

What We Mean When We Say Our Health-Care Program Costs Less

TBT makes a strong claim about its cooperative health-care program.

We believe that no competing group health program offers better benefits at a lower total cost than the cooperative program we offer.

That claim is deliberately open to challenge.

Anyone can compare what we provide and what it costs with a program he or she actually purchases.

The important number is total economic cost, not merely what appears on an employee's paycheck. An employer paying the premium does not make insurance free. Government paying for coverage does not make health care free. Someone pays for it.

We compare the total amount paid for the benefits and services with the total cost of our cooperative program.

And there is a simple way to prove us wrong.

If someone who actually purchases a competing program can demonstrate that it provides better benefits at a lower total cost, we will publicly acknowledge that we were wrong and will be interested in offering their better solution instead.

We are not interested in winning an advertising argument.

We are interested in finding the least expensive effective way for people to obtain the health care they need.

Religion, Writing, and Other Work

Health care is only part of my public record.

I am a minister of The Order of Love, Peace, Truth, Tolerance, and Cooperation. Religion and the obligation of human beings to care for one another have influenced much of my thinking about economics and health care.

I have also written for many years.

My work includes books and essays about health care, economics, cooperation, religion, war, death, aging, politics, science, family, and ordinary life, as well as poetry, stories, plays, and autobiographical writing.

Some of it is serious.

Some is satire.

Some is intentionally provocative.

I do not expect readers to agree with all of it, and I have no desire to rewrite old opinions merely to make an Internet search more agreeable.

Disagreement with something I actually wrote is different from attributing something to me that I did not write.

My work has appeared under Donald H. McCormick, Don McCormick, and the identifier donmcco. I have also recorded or participated in videos and music available in various places on the Internet. Search engines do not consistently connect those works with my professional history.

Other People Named Donald McCormick

This distinction is particularly important.

There are many people named Donald McCormick and Don McCormick in public databases and Internet searches.

They include academics, physicians, businessmen, government employees, defendants in criminal cases, litigants, and numerous other people.

They are not all me.

The most useful identifiers for my public history are:

Donald H. McCormick / Don McCormick
Tomorrow's Bread Today (TBT)
Patient Physician Cooperative (PPC)
Physicians ACO (PACO)
Houston/Splendora, Texas
donmcco

A record that merely contains the name Donald or Don McCormick, without other information connecting it to this history, should not automatically be attributed to me.

Errors and Confusion in Internet Records

Some Internet databases contain information about me or TBT that is demonstrably incorrect, obsolete, or incomplete.

One commercial business database, for example, has reported that Tomorrow's Bread Today began in 2009.

That cannot be correct.

Contemporary newspaper reports identify me publicly with Tomorrow's Bread Today years before 2009, and TBT's organizational history dates its creation to 1994.

Other sources give different dates for the beginning of Patient Physician Cooperative. Part of that confusion results from the development of predecessor activities before the Houston PPC was formally organized in the form described by outside publications.

Internet records also preserve obsolete addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, organizational titles, and lists of officers or trustees. Historical information should not automatically be assumed to describe the organization today.

Successes and Failures

I do not want this page to become an advertisement disguised as a biography.

During a long life I have participated in things that succeeded and things that failed.

Patient Physician Cooperative demonstrated that patients and physicians could cooperate directly.

Physicians ACO demonstrated that physicians working together could produce substantial measured savings for Medicare.

Charitable clinics provided care.

Some hospital projects never became the hospitals we intended to build.

The Dallas hospital project consumed considerable money, donated professional work, and years of effort before it failed.

Physicians ACO lost a dispute with the federal government that I continue to believe we should have won.

Those things are all true.

They also belong to the same history.

For me, the useful question has never been whether every experiment succeeds. It is whether ordinary people can learn enough from successes and failures to cooperate more effectively the next time.

Why This Page Exists

Commercial background services and search engines are useful tools, but they are poor biographers.

They find fragments.

A newspaper finds a hospital.

A government database finds an ACO.

A court database finds a lawsuit.

A nonprofit database finds a tax return.

A bookseller finds a book.

A search engine finds a poem, an essay, a video, or a song.

A people-search service finds several other Donald McCormicks and may fail to distinguish among them.

The fragments can be individually accurate and still produce a person who never existed.

This page does not ask anyone to disregard the public record.

Quite the opposite.

Read it.

The public record includes government documents, contemporary newspaper reporting, nonprofit filings, court decisions, books, interviews, and the records of the organizations with which I have worked.

This page exists to provide the context connecting those records.

For more than half a century, much of my work has concerned a fairly simple proposition:

People should be able to cooperate voluntarily to care for one another, and institutions should serve human beings rather than the other way around.

I have tried that proposition in insurance, physician organizations, clinics, hospitals, Medicare accountable care, charitable work, housing, writing, and community cooperatives.

Some of those efforts worked better than others.

They are nevertheless parts of the same story.

Selected Independent Public Records

Readers who wish to verify this history can begin with these independent sources:

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — CMS's 2012 announcement of new Medicare Shared Savings Program ACOs identifies Physicians ACO, LLC in Houston as a network of individual practices involving 75 physicians.

CMS Medicare Shared Savings Program records — Federal records document the operation and financial performance of Accountable Care Organizations, including Physicians ACO, during the relevant performance years.

Federal court records — Physicians ACO litigation — The federal cases involving Physicians ACO document the dispute concerning CMS quality reporting and the contractor-operated reporting portal. These records also make clear that Physicians ACO was the plaintiff seeking relief.

Houston Chronicle — Contemporary reporting from the early 2000s documents my involvement with Tomorrow's Bread Today, physician organizations, hospital development, and charitable/free-clinic projects in the Houston and Pearland area.

YES! Magazine — Reporting on American cooperatives describes the origin of the Houston Patient/Physician Cooperative, identifies me as its founder, and reports approximately 60 participating clinics at the time.

Society for Participatory Medicine — A 2016 interview discusses Patient Physician Cooperatives and my work organizing cooperative approaches to health care.

Federal nonprofit records and TBT organizational records — These document the existence and continuing operation of The Order of Love, Peace, Truth, Tolerance, and Cooperation, doing business as Tomorrow's Bread Today.

These records do not necessarily tell every part of the story exactly as I would tell it. That is one reason I have provided this history.

They do, however, give anyone interested in checking my account a place to begin.

Donald H. McCormick
Tomorrow's Bread Today
Patient Physician Cooperative