Member Spotlight: David Foucachon, Samaritan Board of Directors

Why SMI? David loves 'sharing in prayer'

David Foucachon can see a theme in the jobs the Lord has led him to.

From launching Roman Roads Press—a homeschool curriculum publishing company—with his brother to starting a second company, Kepler Education—an independent marketplace for online teachers—to co-founding and leading Veritas Surgery as CEO, David’s goal has been to bypass unnecessary gatekeepers.

“In the education world, you have accreditation boards and government bureaucrats deciding what is an approved course of study and what’s not,” said the newly elected member of the Samaritan Ministries Board of Directors, “but as soon as you walk away from the government money, those strings fall away.

“In the medical world, it gets even more complicated, because even the quasi-private insurance companies are operating under colossal conflicts of interest, and they’re the ones deciding who’s in network and who’s not.”

David’s family

David, 35, was elected to the Samaritan Board in November. He lives with his wife, Anne, in northern Idaho and their five children, all under age 12.

“We are definitely in the trenches these days,” he joked.

Anne homeschools the kids, who are part of a co-op involving several local churches, including their own congregation, Christ Church, in Moscow, Idaho.

“If our house is the ship, (Anne) is the keel,” David said. “She gives us stability. Both my brother and I have been entrepreneurs, and that comes with a lot of craziness and upheaval. I don’t think that steadiness would be possible without that keel on the bottom of the ship. She is the stabilizing element that keeps our household sane.”

The Lord had other plans

David grew up on the missions field in France where his father, Francis Foucachon, was a church planter and pastor. The family moved to Idaho in 2005, and David attended New Saint Andrews College. He planned to transfer to the University of Idaho to pursue a chemical engineering degree, but the Lord had other plans.

“I realized that if I pursued chemical engineering, I would be at the mercy of wherever a corporate job led me, and I really wanted to put down roots here where my family was living,” he said. “So, I dropped that plan and wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but ended up starting a business with my brother in the publishing industry.”

David served as chief operating officer at Roman Roads Press and later became the chief financial officer for Kepler Education. His current business, Veritas Surgery, is a direct-care surgery solution that allows cash-pay patients to bypass the gatekeepers and artificially inflated prices of insurance networks. One thing David is seeing drive positive change in health care is how patients are thinking of themselves as valued consumers rather than beneficiaries. The concept of having more control of one’s health care and having the freedom to choose where and how one’s money will be spent makes a person feel valued.

“That’s one thing I think Samaritan’s model does a better job of than a number of other health care sharing ministries,” he said. “The decentralized nature of Samaritan’s sharing system means that Samaritan members are genuinely acting as cash-pay patients.”

Tools like Healthcare Bluebook™ both incentivize and empower patients to be informed decision-makers, which is a healthy direction that excites David.

“One of the things that I think self-funded employers have done a really good job of and that I’m excited to see starting to happen with health care sharing ministries is the robust alignment of incentives, but in a way that preserves freedom of choice,” he said.

“Shopping around for health care as an informed patient can save astounding sums of money, but it has to be voluntary. To do that well, you have to align incentives. I love the fact that (Samaritan has) no networks. You can go to whatever provider you want, but we’re going to reward you financially if you go through the trouble of finding a fairly priced provider.”

Valuing innovation

David said his connections and daily interactions in the world of free market health care are reasons he wanted to serve on Samaritan’s Board.

“There’s so much innovation happening in that world, and I want to see all of that innovation benefit the world of health care sharing ministries, so just acting as a bridge between those worlds is my goal,” he said. “We’ve solved the misaligned incentives on the payer side, but we’re still dealing with obscene bills on the provider side.”

In the early days of Veritas Surgery, a colleague asked David what made him get involved in this movement and co-found Veritas with his business partner, Dr. Matthew Abraham.

“I was initially uneasy with my gut answer of ‘anger,’” he said. “Anger at the predatory government-sponsored cartel that is the U.S. medical system. But I remembered something my pastor once said about kinds of anger: In the New Testament, when Jesus gets angry, things don’t get broken, people get healed. That’s my vision for Veritas.”

David also credits another pastor—his father—for shaping his perspective today. His example of being a faithful shepherd taught David how to lead like Jesus.

“When my father saw a problem, instead of complaining about it, he’d do something to fix it," he said. "I think that attitude of not complaining but looking for solutions is a big part of who he was that shaped my brother and me into who we are today. I think that attitude engendered an entrepreneurial mindset that carried over into the business world."

Prayer requests

• "That the business practices of everyone at Veritas Surgery, as well as our many colleagues in the direct primary care space, would be a testimony to unbelievers we interact with in the medical world."
• "Protection from malicious, targeted legislation against both direct primary care medicine and health care sharing ministries."
• "Strength for my wife and the wife of my co-founder, Dr. Matthew Abraham, as they homeschool our children while their husbands build and grow a new business.”