Ep. 7: Michael Echols and Why He’s Running for Congress

In this episode of The Waiting Tables Podcast, we sit down with Michael Echols for a wide-ranging conversation about service, leadership, business, and his run for Congress in Louisiana’s 5th District.

Michael shares his story from Bastrop to ULM, from banking and business to restoring downtown Monroe one building at a time. The conversation covers real estate, public service, economic development, healthcare reform, PBMs, tax policy, and what it really takes to step into politics and fight for change.

This episode is about more than a campaign. It’s about vision, risk, community, and what it looks like to serve when the stakes are real.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Wedding Tables Podcast, sponsored by Brascotta the Law, where we share stories of people in our community who live and serve up.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

It's gonna be fair and balanced, Jim.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

So uh thanks for coming on the show. Uh I uh I'm really excited to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

You know, I've I've known you a long time, and it seems like our paths crossed whenever I was in my early, late teens, early twenties when I was a student at ULM, and then you when you were at ULM, and then later on in life you become a state representative, and I'm you know, city councilman before that, got uh got to be involved in local politics, which I recommend anybody that's trying to, you know, run for a higher office do before they try to move on up in the world because you learn so much when you actually get out on the ground and meet your constituents and learn about the basics of of you know just municipalities and government. Uh there are a lot of complexities there, but knowing, you know, from the ground level up, it helps you in your legislative process and you know, even higher.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Well well, if you don't mind, can we I don't really know much about your I'm an open book, the backstory like you know, the the why? The the who is Michael Eccles at 13.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Oh, so um I'll go back. I was born and raised in Morehouse Parish, grew up in Bastrup, uh of course, uh just 25 miles north of here. Um as a kid, you know, I played golf as a kid, I played football, I played basketball. Of course, I wasn't the uh all-star, you know, type shot, but uh probably sixth man on the team. Um, you know, so enjoyed athletics, enjoyed golf. I've I've continued to play golf throughout the rest of my life, you know, which is good because I like vitamin D and that that uh a little round of golf about once a month, it does the soul of good. But uh born and raised there, graduated, moved to Monroe when I was 18, uh, attended UL NLU at the time, uh, got a degree in accounting, uh, worked in a lot of organizations while I was there, Pi Sigma Epsilon marketing, co-ed marketing fraternity, which um helped me understand how to run businesses because they basically ran a small incubator. And so that really probably propelled me as a business person, understanding accounting, marketing, sales, all the different components of running a business. And I got to learn that hands-on in college.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Before we leave college, what why why accounting?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

So I just went to uh friends and family and I said, hey, uh, when I first started, I signed up for finance because you know, just finance sounded cool to me. And then I went to different friends and family members, and I was sitting with uh probably my stepfather, and he was we was talking about, you know, his business, his role in banking. And he said, you know, accounting's one of the best business degrees you can get. And I thought, well, okay, I'll go try that. My grandfather had graduated in accounting as well, uh, for one of the first students to ever graduate at night later in life. And so I said, okay, well, if he did it, uh other family members did it, I'll go try that. Uh I was definitely a C student, uh, not uh probably made for uh to be an accountant or CPA long term, but uh finished the degree program. I said basically C for degree was my my motto. And uh actually it taught me later in life that you know C students are are great people to hire because they just figure out ways to get the job done, and it's really you know, inspired uh people to, you know, work hard and get get their lives done by while having some social uh components to their life. After that, uh went back and got my master's of business administration and uh then from there, you know, worked in wealth management for about a decade and banking. And then after that, uh was at ULM as a cabinet level position for a few years, uh really got to see inside government and how inefficient government was, and then uh worked in the healthcare industry and real estate for the next, well, the next 15 to 20 years.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

There's a lot of transitions in there.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

There's three you got finance, uh, higher ed, and then healthcare real estate. So I've gotten to see some broad perspectives of different industries, and it's it's really lent a lot to my role as a state legislator, and even before that as a city councilman.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

So in the real estate piece, and I think this is something that a lot of people can probably connect with. I mean, there's a lot of people that own a few rental properties. Sure. You know, I mean I've got a few rental properties and uh besides my office, but I mean you've kind of moved into like more of a commercial now with the Hotel Monroe, like uh it's uh you're kind of on a different level in the real estate game than probably I'm imagining where you started.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

It's all well from where you start is it in life, you always transition and grow. Uh, and so I just, you know, compared to everybody else, I probably have more debt than everybody else. Uh and and but we have more assets and things that we're working with to grow and fix. You know, when I first came into downtown Monroe, a historic downtown, a beautiful area, great structures, but they were dilapidated and falling down. And so I I did some research over the years and I realized that there were start and stops in the 70s, 1974, I think under Ralph Troy, who maybe have been the mayor, I'd found a plan that said we're revitalizing downtown Monroe, because people had moved out, the sprawl had started from a development and commerce perspective, and they were working on redevelopment. Then there was another push in the 80s by another mayor and administration, then there was another push in the 90s by another mayor administration, then the 2000s. So you see these plans that were put on shelves and nothing was ever done. And so when I look at downtown Monroe, there were all these stops and starts, but all these vacant and blighted buildings. Nobody was could figure out how to do anything. And so on a Saturday morning, um, and this is almost 20 years ago, I wandered into downtown Monroe and uh started going. Um there was an estate sale at a building, and I walked in and there was some stuff for sale, just junk and things and Clarence's old stuff. And so I went in and I said, Well, how much for this pile of stuff? And he said, Well, make me an offer. And so I for about an hour went back and forth, bought a handful of knickknacks and other things, construction material. And finally I said, Well, what are you gonna do with these buildings? Because there were three buildings side by side. He said, Well, I'm gonna sell those two. I said, Well, how much? He said, Make me an offer. And so I reached out and I said, Okay, I'll I'll give you X number of dollars. Uh, and he said, Give me just a minute. He walked in the back room, he came back, he made a phone call, he came back out and he said, Will you give me $5,000 more? I said, Under one condition. You lock the doors today. I said, I get all the junk that's in here, and then from there, I'll I'll buy the buildings next week. Now, I didn't have financing, I didn't have anything. I literally made a deal, I walked out, I called my banker, I was like, hey, I need some money on Monday. I told this guy I was gonna buy these buildings, but I saw the hope and the potential of the buildings. They had great structure, great bones, lots of cool stuff in them, but they needed a ton of work. So from there, I mean, this almost sounds like the spur of the moment.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Like it was quite impulsive. Like, yeah, like.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

My my grandmother had been in real estate. She bought and uh fixed up rent houses, and I'd seen this early on. She had a realtor's license. So I'd always had an appreciation for real estate and what it meant to people and what it what it helped grow for people. You know, it grew grew freedom for people to have, you know, assets that produce income that can, you know, subsidize other parts of your life. So from there, that became a beginning point. But then when I started to go, you know, building to building and get to know the neighbors around the building, there were some really unique stories and really unique families that had held these properties forever. And many of those families didn't have the resources or the want to fix them anymore. So after some period of buying several other small buildings, um, I had families calling me like, hey, I've got a building over here. Would you be interested in it? We just want to see something good happen to it. So what I realized very quickly is there was a lot of community good that can come of restoring these buildings. Now, you don't restore a building if you can't find a tenant. So after restoring the first building on hope, and a couple people saying they were gonna do something that fell through, but in the end, somebody came and rented that first building. And then a month or two later they called and said, Hey, we need another building. Can you do another one for us? So then it just kind of became a snowball. And I realized quickly that people want to be in a place that's special to do whatever they're gonna do, to create an economic opportunity. And so from there, that's what kind of led to the next building, the next building, the next building, and then the next block, the next block, the next block.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Well. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

And go black, white, blue, and green, rich, poor, middle. I mean, it's just it's a it's a great environment to see all these people coming together. And I I know later in the show we're gonna talk about, you know, the the hotel and some of the unique things that are coming because of it, but uh, but it has been very special to watch this evolve over time.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Yeah, and the side the new sidewalks. And if I'm being a hundred percent honest with you during the construction project, I'm like it was rigorous. Why in the hell are we doing this? Yeah, and then you see a finished product, and it is it, you know, my wife and I were driving down uh the other day, and we're like, you know, it is actually looking pretty good. Yeah, I'm liking this, you know. So I mean it's it there's there's some pain with the progress, but then you get kind of to the plateau of you know, the end result. And uh, you know, if you planned well, you you get something that you can appreciate.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Absolutely. Well, and that's uh I guess time and pressure make diamonds. It's kind of like we do this investment in downtown, we start to restore these buildings one by one and and fix block by block. And now you're starting to see people get excited about it and and people say, well, you're this is an overnight success. No, this is 20 years, almost 20 years, of blood, sweat, and tears of reinvesting and reinvesting and reinvesting, and we're still reinvesting. I mean, I don't take money from our real estate developments, we plow it back in and try to fix the next block or the next thing. Uh, in in those 15 to 20 years, we've bought a bunch of stuff. We've only ever sold one building. Uh, the rest of them, we're just trying to create this theater of opportunity where we've got all these different components to it, and it's a stage where people can come down and enjoy what I think is what defines a community. Downtowns are the heart and soul of a community. And if you've got a healthy heart, that means the rest of the community is healthy. So we've done everything we can to repair the heart of our community. And uh fortunately, our investments now extend not only in Monroe but all the way down I-20 into Ruston. And so we're looking for other things as we grow those uh two different markets, and we uh like what we see in North Louisiana.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

So, with the first uh gentleman that you bought that property from in downtown, was that your first real estate investment?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Well, I mean, I outside of owning a home in the garden district, I bought a historic home on Aaron Avenue in the garden district. Uh basically took it down to the studs, gutted it, and restored it, and kind of got the bug when it came come to came to restoring things uh just to take a historic building and the the truly unique construction types that they use to build those things. I mean, they were built to last. And so that was my first personal real estate investment when I was probably 22, 23 years old buying a house and then fast forward, you know, buying and uh investing in downtown real estate would have been my my second set of transactions.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

So do you still have that house that you restore on Aaron Avenue?

SPEAKER_00 12:25

I sold the Aaron Avenue house to a great couple and then ended up buying uh on Riverside Drive. That was my my second house to acquire, and we had to do an extensive renovation on it too, but I've still got that one.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Well, I was just I was just curious, guys. I know like a lot of people and myself included, you know, they they keep on they hold on to that first house and that sort of becomes a you know a uh an asset that they can pledge for other people.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Unfortunately at the time I had to sell that house to buy the next house. So it was uh, you know, take whatever proceeds we we made on that one and invest it in the next house. And and again, we've been in the next house since, you know, almost 20 years now.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Wow. That's great. I mean, I know where it's at. I think I've been there one time before you uh renovated it.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

So in 20 uh, I think it was 14, it's either 14 or 16. I think it was 14, uh, we had to do a massive renovation because we had an F2 tornado come down K Street, like literally right beside my house, and did, you know, a six-figure amount of damage. And so again, it was pretty inspiring to watch after the fact and and getting getting over six months of not being able to live in your house while you make the restoration, um, getting to see the neighbors and the community that came out and helped and the love and the community that that literally wants to help their neighbors. And we see it time and time again in North Louisiana. There are uh just thousands of people here that love their neighbors and try to do what's best for the city, the community, the region. And uh, we saw that after that storm and again after the floods in 2016, and again after the, you know, the the freezes and all the other chaos that we have in our our Louisiana weather here, uh it's been inspiring to see these people step up again and again and again.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Going back to college, um, did you uh beyond school and I I heard you mentioned Pi Sigma Epsilon, um did you have any other extracurricular activities that were meaningful in your development?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah, so uh there was the college level of Kiwanas uh called Circle K. That was probably the first nonprofit organization I joined when I was, I think, 19. And so there it was just able to connect other people that wanted to do community service projects. So that's where I've kind of fell in love with doing nonprofit work was uh working with Circle K. You know, we'd do river pickups, we would work with the Kianas Club to do their Pancake Day, everybody knows about Pancake Day, uh, and raising money for community initiatives. Now that transcended on later in life after Kianas, after uh Circle K in college, I went on to join Kawanas. It was my first nonprofit membership where I joined, ultimately became the president of that club. We did some awesome work throughout the region. Um, then that led to multiple other groups. You know, I was a past uh president of Monroe Rotary, uh, have worked in, you know, founding board member for Center for Children and Families, uh, worked in CASA, did one of the first fundraisers in 1998 for the annual um, what was the barn party, and raised, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for CASA, really to help expand their mission on helping, you know, those kids that are uh abused and neglected and in those systems, uh, which again, the social service side of the house, I've been able to work in lots of nonprofit organizations to do lots of social service issues. Uh, arts, uh, been involved in the Arts and Arts Council, was uh chairman of the Northeast Louisiana Arts Council, had gone on and done uh chairmanship of the State Arts Council and get to work with individual artists, another passion of ours. And you'll see that in a lot of our real estate developments that uh we try to infuse individual artists within different components of projects we're working on. You'll see that in the Hotel Monroe as well. So uh I've I've gotten my stripes over the years, and you'll see little pieces of each stripe, each lesson that's applied in each next business deal or development that we're doing that incorporates some of that, whether it's social service, whether it's the arts, or whether it's some other problem we're trying to fix, we we add that to our real estate development. And it may make them not as profitable, but at the end of the day, uh it's fun to watch your community grow while you're fixing some a scar, turning that scar into something that is really a magnet to bring people into your community.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Wow. That's uh it's interesting. You you mentioned problems. What how do you identify what a problem is and as far as you know, with your real estate projects?

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Like what do you what do you what I I know that sounds like a silly question, but I mean So some of the buildings we buy, people tell us we should just tear them down. And really, if you look at them, it is less expensive to just tear these buildings down, like tear down the fabric of your community, the things that built your community. It may be, you know, you had a uh a center for Jewish commerce, and these are old buildings that these families built, like the Crest Building, like um well, even um, you know, Southern Hardware and the Poolside Shop, those buildings, the the um but those buildings deserve to be s saved. And there's actually a metric and and even incentives that are out there. State and federal historic tax credits are part of the incentives to keep that fabric alive and being built. And there's there's a real ripple effect with those incentives. You know, we've noticed that after you take an old building that may be a hundred years old and bring it back, it may have a tree growing through it, maybe piles of debris in it. But if you restore that fabric of the community, you go back to the heart, the amount of energy and that magnetism that draws people back to that area creates this huge amount of commerce. Commerce drives sales tax revenues. Sales tax revenues make that incentive worth whatever investments were made by the feds or the state by way of those state and federal credits. So that's why they exist. Is that the remote? It's one of the few credits that exist that actually has a net return to the state and to the feds. Uh I mean, for every dollar, and this is on a very lean analysis, for every dollar that that is invested by the state or feds, there's a payback of $1.07, and it's almost immediate. Like it takes a number of years. But if you look at the sales taxes and the federal taxes that are generated in a very short period of time, those investments pay back quickly.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Um they're complex and hard though.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

Well, this is kind of kind of where I'm I'm kind of steering it somewhere, and I think I'm I think we're almost there. Okay. What what would your advice be to somebody that's say, I don't know, like 22, 23, that's interested in real estate or interested in growing like a portfolio of financial assets? Um and I'm asking you this too, and we hadn't really touched on your work in uh uh wealth advising or financial advising, but I'm really kind of asking what what would your advice be to somebody that's kind of coming up that's you know, maybe they live on the you know the wrong side of town or maybe they're just you know middle class, just trying to figure out how to grow. What would you say to somebody like that that could help them, you know, position themselves and direct themselves and their efforts towards something that could one day provide a return for themselves, but also improve this community?

SPEAKER_00 19:22

So I think one of the best ways that you can one start your real estate career or you know, making a personal investment is if you can figure out a way to invest in your own neighborhood. First start with your own property. I'm a value investor. I like to find something that is that nobody wants and try to make it nice, good again, and that other people want. So if you live in a neighborhood and you've got a blighted block next to you, I'd start by buying, you know, the worst of the worst, fix it up, put your sweat equity into it. Like everything I've done has been bootstrap investing. I don't I didn't come from wealth. I literally had to make all these projects work by one, me being in there, you know, 50, 60 hours a week, uh painting, uh doing concrete work, doing plumbing work. I've got the scars to prove it, uh, and numerous other things. Now I'm not that great of an electrician. I try to hire, you know, electricians when I when I did work early on in my life. But uh but if it required a shovel or a hoe or a uh a concrete breaker, I've operated those. Um so sweat equity goes a long way. We have one thing that, you know, hopefully, is time, time and your own labor, picking a block, picking a building, fixing that first, leasing it. And there's nothing more rewarding than to take that work, putting sweat into it, and then watching someone else say, I appreciate that. I'd like to live there too. And then going building by building, block by block, and fixing those. Once you start to accumulate several of those, and I've got lots of friends that have done this now, and I know you you do too, and work with people like this, but once you start to accumulate, you know, a a series of houses or maybe it's apartments, you know, you kind of grow. And once you realize how hard it is to do one building and one block at a time, then you try to buy apartments or other larger investments because it's it's easier to manage scale than the one-off that you're doing, you know, one building at a time. But you got to start somewhere if you don't have a lot to start with.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

So do you you have some residential stuff? Is would you say residential over commercial or commercial over residential?

SPEAKER_00 21:19

I mean, no, I think that uh just it just depends on what you like. I started in working on, you know, flipping houses. Probably did four or five houses um in my first several years before we really got into a robust commercial market. It's depends on what you like, but uh I think commercial, you typically have a tenant that's gonna stay three to five years. And so it's a lot easier to manage a commercial tenant um than it is to manage, you know, ten individual homeowners that have, you know, unique challenges home by home.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Yeah. Well, and I'm I'm asking that you said you I know you recently developed that apartment, those apartments on uh was it Walnut?

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Yeah, Walnut Lofts. Um that one was uh an old boxing ring and an old skating ring. They were these big open buildings. And one of the things that we look is we look at all the properties in the downtown, you need heads and beds, people that are gonna be there day in, day out, that are gonna be going to the, you know, the shop down the street to buy coffee, that are gonna go to your restaurants and bars at night. You got to have that base that live there. And so that was always the discussion. Is it the chicken or the egg? Do you have the people living down there? Well, if you don't have the bars and restaurants ahead of them, then they have nothing to do. And they're just gonna be walking around and empty. So we started with working on um basic mom and pop shops, bars, restaurants, and retail shops first. And then we started working on the housing side of the house. And that was, you know, developing market rate, some high-end, some middle end, and then some affordable units all weaved into one large portfolio of, you know, several hundred apartments.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

Interesting. I mean, that's congratulations. I mean, that's fantastic. I mean, you kind of reminded me of uh some other political leaders that uh have been in real in the real estate game.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

Well, they they uh were in a different market. I think starting in New York City and building large commercial spaces that that occupy has a dramatically higher return than investing in small rural North Louisiana, but we still have the same hope and opportunity. And you know, um I've got a big, beautiful ballroom too in downtown Monroe. And so we uh we do share some similarities when it comes to um real estate and investment, but they're in a much different stratosphere by way of rents that you get.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

So you went from, and I keep backing away from this mic, and I'm and then Nolan's gonna yell at me here in a minute.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

I've been in radio for 23 years. I know how to hold steady.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Yeah, I'm not good at it. I'm like wanting to wait, you know, like relax. So we we talked about the real estate, which I'm in all sincerity, congratulations on building that portfolio that you've built. I mean, it's really uh it's admirable. And I know it took a lot of effort and uh skill and you know a risk. And that risk part is a lot of people, I don't know if people understand risk or not, but I think if you haven't ever really taken the risk, you really don't understand what it's like to sign a promissory note, knowing that you know I'm gonna pay this off no matter what. You hope to.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Well, you know, if you you go back, I I didn't grow up wealthy, but I mean I grew up comfortable. My my grandparents, uh, you know, they worked hard and my parents worked hard. Um but I guess when you start with not a lot, to be able to come and take risks, you're you're not worried about losing anything because you didn't come from a huge portfolio of wealth. So you don't mind putting everything on the line to risk and grow when you when you've never had a whole bunch. So I think that's part of the story is that you know, people that want to, and we're trying to fix a problem too. So we're led both not only by passion, but by just the per pursuit of fixing a a community legacy problem. You see a lot of poverty throughout Louisiana. And when I travel my rural markets and I go, you know, downtowns and other places, I just see hope and opportunity because people just need to see the vision of what it could be. And a lot of people have a tough time doing that. They they take a vacant, blighted building that may have a tree growing through it and go, Well, that's a teardown. Well, to me, that's a build up. That's something you should be able to repair and put back into commerce. And there's going to be a bright, budding entrepreneur that says that is the perfect space for me to build my bakery or to put my you know bar, restaurant, whatever else it is, in there. And so as a real estate investor, my job is just to uh root hope.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

Interesting. Um, but so congratulations. It's awesome. I think it's awesome. I mean, it's just my personal opinion. But how did that so you were a financial advisor for a while, correct?

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah, so I was a registered securities agent. Uh I was in banking for a few years, worked at a uh capital bank, and I've got some great stories from that.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Um Capital Bank is what now?

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Um I don't know. They sold a bunch of times. Okay. So it went to but it's probably Origin Bank now.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Or actually some of the people from Origin Bank uh, a big bank ended up buying it out. It sold four or five times before it was that community bank. It started in Del High, ended up in Monroe, grew in Monroe. And I when I first started, I was a runner. And then I got put into network administration. So it was me and a gentleman by the name of John. And so we did all the computers in the building. And I was not a computer expert. I'm I'm 18 years old and I'm in there rebuilding computers. And then fast forward another year or two later, when the bank finally sold, uh, a lot of the executives left. So the president left, uh, George Cummings was the president, Bobby um uh was our our CFO. We had a human resources director and a CEO. And I remember CEO called me down to his office one day and says, Hey, I need somebody to do the capital expenditure budgeting for all of our branches, and you're the only one on this floor. So I'm 19, 20 years old in accounting. I was like, okay. So I go and meet with all the branches and I get the capital expenditure budgets together and built that and got it done and turned it in, and everything was great. And I'm like, okay, I can do accounting. And so just kind of learning and earning as I went, you know, that then they were like, well, we need you to go and run a commercial teller line today. So I learned how to do that, never been trained, just started moving money in and out, debits, credits, make sure it balanced at the end of the day. And uh all those little things led up to broader lessons in my life to just jump in, say yes, figure it out, and get it done. And if you screw up, that's okay. Same thing in real estate. You're gonna screw up. Like I've wasted tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions, on you know, just time or interest or whatever else it is as we've built these properties. But the main thing is you just keep pushing forward and trying to solve a problem every single day. And when you're in real estate, you got a hundred problems every day. And uh that's what we've tried to do is just again solving problems and trying to grow and make things better.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

Did you have a mentor and all that?

SPEAKER_00 28:09

You know, over time when you're in this role, you just look at people that may be doing a little bit of that. So, my of course, my grandmother started all that when it came to her doing little rent houses up in Vastrup, and I remember seeing that. Um, but you know, I've got lots of people in financial services that I've I've talked to over the years. Um, Tom Nicholson's a good friend of mine. Uh always enjoyed the fireside chats with him on the complexities of community and community service and growing businesses. Um, there are a few other folks around the state that I've I've looked at as a mentor bucket, some in Baton Rouge that are, you know, corporate tycoons now that have done great things, but they did it because of the bootstrap methodology. They've worked hard, uh, even to the point where and it's mostly those entrepreneurs that started from nothing. Those are the ones that give me the most uh motivation, not the ones that maybe have walked into a deal that, you know, a billion-dollar corporation, maybe a three billion dollar corporation.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

I think that it's um So you subs you sounds like you subscribe more to the modeling way of like learning how to do things unless like just one individual mentor or teacher. Oh yeah. No, no. I um you've like tried to sound like you try to model from others that you've witnessed see things.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

I'm a redneck too. And when you tell me no, you can't do that, that's just impossible. I'm like, well, well, I'm about to show you something. So uh I don't know whether that's modeling or stupidity, but it's uh it's literally just get out there and figure out how to solve a problem. When I see a block and say, okay, how in the world can I solve that problem? Then it's just working through my network and the resources I've got to figure out how to solve that problem. And so that's what we've done is just over the years, you know, worked on solving complex problems. Now I don't do this alone. My wife is an architect, she is part of the team, a vibrant part of the team. She makes buildings very special, um, just whether it's through design, whether it's to function, or whether it's to the experience while you're in there. I mean, you know, having that architectural background has added a lot of value to everything that we do. And so uh, you know, we've got a team of people that help us make our downtowns great again.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

So uh going to uh your work as a city councilman, um, what would you feel, what do you think is like the the biggest takeaway? I mean, I you know, I mean, I'm sure there's like a thousand conversations and things that happen that you've forgotten by now.

SPEAKER_00 30:32

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

But what would you say is like that work? I mean, I guess here's my here's my real question. Why would anybody want that job? I mean, and I mean that in a sense of like there's so much scrutiny, there's so much opposition, and I'm I'm saying this not just watching you do that job. I'm saying like chaos. There's chaos everyone do that job in jobs like it.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

You know, I think if you've got a heart to serve, if you've again I've worked in a lot of nonprofit organizations to raise money and fix problems. I think once you see you've got a community that has potential. And I saw that in Monroe. When I ran for city council, uh, I saw, okay, Monroe's got these great opportunities, but it just needs the right leadership. You see people get in there and they do it for the wrong reasons, and it becomes very evident. That's culture, right? You got a bad culture. I saw a bad culture in our city at the time. Previous mayor, previous council, and it just something needed to change. So when I jumped into that race, ran against the former chairman of the city council, and you know, we went out, and what I learned uh in in races, you got to get out and talk to people. You got to touch, shake hands, and visit with folks. And so we knocked on every door in that district, district one, uh twice over that year. And we ended up winning that race by almost 20 points because we got out and talked to people and really just hand-to-hand combat, if you will. But what I learned in that, you know, what people wanted out of their city, I mean, obviously pick up the trash, keep the street lights on, keep my streets clean, do the basic services. But they also saw Monroe as this city that had been great at some point, but it it just had run down a bit and needed that enhancement, that life, that light, and repair the heart. So when we ran for that race, once it was over, the next day, Sunday, it started raining. And it rained for the next 32 hours.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

I remember that.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Yeah. And that was 20 to 30 some odd inches of rain in that time frame. So I didn't even, I wasn't even sworn in yet. My next job was to get out and go from pump station to pump station, one to make sure pumps were on and show people, look, the city's doing what it can. This is just an overwhelming amount of rain. Evaluating infrastructure, um, hog bayou and and the water that was coming out of Bayou desiered. I mean, like our whole region is a series of mud puddles. Water moves from one mud puddle to the next, but there was so much of it that mud puddles couldn't handle it. So everything was overflowing. A street that I had jogged down three days before, I was boating down in five foot of water on Deborah Drive and helping people immediately, I learned that my role as a city councilman was to be in the middle of the fight fixing those problems. During the nights of the storms, me and uh folks like Alan Brockman and numerous other guys went out and we're calling city leaders saying, hey, this flood control structure is about to overflow and flood a neighborhood or this flood control structure. You're right. All the different levees that we've got. If we don't remove some of these piles that are in this flood control structure, water's gonna back up into this neighborhood. I know for certain, based on some of the things we did during those floods, we saved a handful of houses from getting water overwhelming though. But there was so much water. But what it taught me too is, you know, the humanity. It was the first experience I got to see where our community jumped up and fought floods together and then helped people recover together. And that was very inspiring to watch and see and to be a part of that, even though I hadn't been sworn in yet. I got a lot of trial by fire. And but it built, you know, people that had been working with the opposite campaign two days before, two weeks later are like, we're never leaving your side. We we saw, you know, you care about the community. We didn't see these other guys out here. You were here in the fight. And that's what people want, I think, in their politicians is just somebody. And look, we've all, you know, whether you like President Trump, whether you like the left or right or all that stuff, at the end of the day, it's about people, it's about getting involved and and serving to your best ability. And that's what we've tried to do over the years is just work as hard as we can and be be there during the hardest times. And I think that's you know, showing people that we care about our community.

SPEAKER_02 34:38

So I'm gonna put your mentor hat back on now.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

So what do you tell that guy that's maybe interested in serving that position but sees all the, for lack of better word, BS that comes along with it?

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Well, if you're not ready to fight through a little BS, some of the mud, if you're not willing to get through that, then you don't need to get in the game because because some people, again, are there doing things for not the right reason and they're fighting good for the sake of just, you know, getting their own little star or getting some little social media plug or whatever. If you're not willing to be able to burn at the, you know, get burned at the stake, uh, don't go to the fight because it is a vicious fight, and because you're fighting against people that don't care about a community, they're just doing it for their own preservation or or gain.

SPEAKER_02 35:22

Well, and that's kind of that's kind of really well, really my question is like, what do you do to address that? I mean, you can't.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

You get in there and you fight, you fight harder than them. You have to beat them. You have to beat the people that are not doing it for the right reasons. And so if you're not willing to step up to that fight and beat those people that are doing it again for the wrong reasons, then don't fight. There are other people that'll step up and fight that fight. And if I can help people that want to fight, that want to do good, that improve our community, our state, our region, um, I'll help you all the way. But you'll see through people, the BS, real quick because a lot of people say a big talk a big game, but they don't show up for the fight. They don't show up for the floods, they don't show up for the freezes, they don't show up for the stuff that matters. Uh, that becomes very evident very quick.

SPEAKER_02 36:04

That makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

Mm-hmm. That fires me up, by the way. I can tell. I can tell you the temperature coming up a little bit in here. I I see it all the time in the legislature. You know, a bunch of people, they'll get on the social media and they'll say, Oh, I'm fighting for this, I'm fighting for that, and they don't author bills, they don't go out and move controversial issues that that actually will move the state forward, but they're they're all about, you know, having their face on TV. You got people running for Congress right there right now. That they're out there, you know, shooting blanks out there, talking big game, but they don't actually deliver. They don't show up to their constituency whenever they're whenever things get rough. Uh but but they're great on TV. They smile real pretty and do fancy things, but they don't actually create actionable items that move our state forward. Uh, and whether that's at the city council level, at the state level, at the federal level, those people exist. My job is to fight like hell to make sure that they don't win and uh we keep moving our area forward with people that want to win for the right reasons.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

So going to the state level, which is a good transition, I mean, what what would you say? I mean, how long have you been I I've lost track of time now?

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Yeah, so I've been in the legislature for six years, um, was elected and uh ran in 2019, ultimately had no opposition, and then, you know, went into that office uh for the next couple of years. You know, I run a lot of bills, a lot in healthcare, uh, some in in finance, and and then other just general bills, depending on what issues we're trying to solve. But I've been there for six years now. Uh this year I serve on uh Ways and Means, Health and Welfare and Labor Committees. Um, I've been on two of those committees for a number of years. I used to be on uh our civil law committee, which is mostly lawyers. I was one of the only non-lawyers on the committee. What I learned though was phenomenal. Uh I watched left lawyers and right lawyers argue issues and the fabric of the law and the gray in the law. And I understood very quickly that law is subject to interpretation, judiciary. And by way of what happens in the judiciary, how they decide on what the law says and what it means. Uh and then we have to come back and reform the way that the law has meaning because sometimes there's some ambiguity in law, right? So I watched and enjoyed again how the law works in that committee. Now, fast forward ways and means, which is our capital outlay committee. That's where we invest money around the state in roads, infrastructure. Uh, I've been serving on that committee for uh a number of years now and have learned a lot about the needs of Louisiana, our infrastructure needs. Um, but this last year I ran for as a majority leader for the House and the Republican caucus. And so getting to know the 73 members of my caucus, uh, which we have a supermajority in the House, and be able to, you know, win that race and be elected to that seat, and now speak on behalf of the Republican delegation at the House level has been a very rewarding experience because we're now looking at moving a body of work, not only some of the governor's priorities, but moving a body of work for 73 members, trying to lower taxes, trying to grow economic development, trying to do all these other things. And it's been fun because we've got a great team. Now the team fights. My job is to help corral those fights and make sure our voice, our communication, and our word gets out by working through, you know, some of the intricacies of policy and structuring that policy where it gets to the finish line and Louisiana wins.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

What do you think is the biggest driver for Louisiana to win?

SPEAKER_00 39:26

So last year, some of the key components that have us winning now in economic development. So about six years ago when we first started, you know, we had a Democrat governor and then majorities, almost majorities, uh, supermajorities in the House and the Senate. So we started working on things like tort reform, which I know our lawyers love. But Louisiana was out of whack compared to other states. So there was some tinkering we did there to help lower and compress auto insurance rates, to compress, you know, workmen's comp, to compress some of the things that are just, we were way in misnomers by way of the data. Our tax policy was bad. Louisiana had an old tax system with inventory tax, franchise tax. We had multiple rates for individuals, you know, multiple rates for corporates. Louisiana is just a complex state to do business in. Um, it's called judicial hellhole, it's called a tax hell hole, it's called all these other hell holes. So our job was to come in and start to address and simplify some of the tax policy, simplify some of the tort policy, simplify these other things. And so for the next six years, we have worked on reforming tax policy, uh, trying to enhance and increase uh criminal justice reforms and even civil justice reforms, and then economic development policy. This last year we did things around, you know, you're starting to see insurance rates come down a bit. I think you'll see them come down more. Uh, our tax policy, probably most in particular, uh the franchise and inventory tax, and then compressing the individual tax rates down to, you know, a flat percentage and corporate rates, bringing those down to 5.5% or less based on, you know, your corporate tax liability. Those things have spurred economic development in ways that we I wouldn't say predicted. We've got over $100 billion of projects that are on the drawing board now, AI centers, LNG manufacturing, all over the state. It is not just, you know, isolated to South Louisiana. This stuff's happening all over the state, and it is tangible. If you look at municipalities, sales tax collections, and other dollars that are happening right now, you're seeing massive increases in all parts of the state in our sales tax collections. That's being reflected in the till at the state level where we're able to go in and compress and pay down debts and ensure that the future has additional dollars that we can invest in other areas of our economy. So there are a lot of things that are happening all at once. It's a very exciting time, I think, to be from Louisiana. Louisiana is being recognized for education reforms, which we made you know three years ago. Um, the economic development wins that are happening, our tax foundation scores. So a lot of good things are happening all at once, and it's fun to be a part of that that exercise.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

So where going going forward, I mean, if you're successful with your bid for the representative, uh what what would you hope to see, I guess, the person that steps into the role that you're in now and his colleagues or her colleagues do to move the ball forward in those ends at least 10,000 feet big picture.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Big picture. So big picture, uh, a couple years ago I worked with a couple of colleagues to create a a website, and I call it a more of a guiding stone for our our delegation and for our leadership. It was called ContractwithLouisiana.com. And on there it talks about things like economic development, tax policy, um, civil criminal justice policy. I mean, all the different things. There are 10 key areas, not social issues, but things that are fabric issues for our state to win. Now we did this two years ago. If you look on that site now, we've actually accomplished in in 24 months about 40 to 50 percent of the things that are on that checklist. They're still there. We haven't updated it yet. We're about to update it and talk about the granular policies under each one of those 10 buckets. For somebody that's coming into this role, if I'm so fortunate to go and serve in Congress uh Congress Fifth District, uh, then the next person that steps up to that role, I hope they would use that guiding stone to keep finishing out that body of work. Again, modeled after contract with America with Newt Gingrich back in the 90s and and the work that they did to, you know, I guess right-size government, lower taxes, and create some other efficiencies where you saw, you know, some of the post Reagan boom and and other things that happened uh, you know, with those different presidencies and uh all the way up into the Clinton years. So all that to say is there's a guiding stone that's out there. We just need to keep finishing that work. Once that work's finished, you know, everybody can go home. They can take a break.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

Well, I saw uh I saw a news article yesterday, and I'm not sure and uh you know, I wish I would have written it down and taken a note, but I think uh the Florida House just passed a law. No, the Florida House took a vote 80% in favor of eliminating property tax. And they already have no income tax, right? Right. So I mean, is Louisiana going to move in that direction? Because from my purview, I think I I hear about that, and I'm imagining everybody waving on their way through I-20 and I-10 on their way to Florida.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yeah, so obviously Florida is becoming a very attractive state to a point now where they're even looking at policies to restrict people that haven't lived in Florida from coming to Florida. Florida's filling up. Louisiana, based on, and if you look at Florida tax policy versus our tax policy, 20 years ago, they couldn't have done that because you can't fund schools, you can't fund all the other stuff for basic local government without property taxes. Louisiana's in the same boat. Our tax policy, we're still an archaic tax policy that we're trying to improve every year. Florida is now a sales tax-based state, like money coming in. They've got Disneyland, they've got all these other attractions. That generates billions and billions of dollars a year where they can go out and start to look at eliminating property taxes. Now, we've put in property tax lock-ins between our homestead exemptions, between veterans, between seniors, and things that stop the property tax creep or inflationary portion of property taxes. I think it'll take a while for Louisiana to get to that environment where a property tax is eliminated because we still have school boards and debt and bond issues that are still have to be paid off and basic local government. Until we reform how our local governments tax and spend and offer government, until we reform on you know from the doge efforts that are happening now on how we spend money and invest money in our communities and reduce the impact of fraud, waste, and abuse, it's gonna take a long time to get there.

SPEAKER_02 45:37

That might happen.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Yeah, it's well, not in the not in the short term, but in longer term, I think there's a way to get there. It's just it's gonna take time. We've got an old tax system and an old structure, and it's gonna take continue to fix that before we can get to that model.

SPEAKER_02 45:50

So do you think that that means we need to develop and I don't know what uh what kind of time frame are you looking at?

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Oh, I've got probably another 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

Okay. So uh do you do you see uh it it sounds like to me that either developers within this state or maybe in connection with the state and the government, uh they're in order for us to compete with like say Florida, uh, which we have resources that Florida doesn't have.

SPEAKER_00 46:21

Oh yeah. It's not that we have to compete with Florida. Now for individuals that want no income tax, personal income tax, we're on a trajectory to get to that. I think you'll see bills that we we author to stair step us to that. It's only a couple billion dollars of income we have to replace in the state to do that. If you continue to grow our industrial base, our manufacturing base, and the other things that fuel our corporate tax collections and and other tax collections, then there is a way to get to where you have no personal income taxes in Louisiana. That makes us competitive on an individual basis. That's really what I'd say is probably the cursor between uh, you know, Florida, Tennessee, and other states, even like North Carolina, that have a very low personal income tax rate. You know, Louisiana's in a top, I would say, ten states by way of going down to a flat 3%, you know, individual income tax rate. That makes us really looked at differently. But you mentioned it before about the natural resources between our ports, you know, three of the largest ports in the world here in Louisiana, three to five actually. Um, when you look at some of the agricultural base that we've got, the natural resources between oil and gas, and just the general commercial market, we can get products to the world very quickly. Florida uh has tremendous amounts of protections around their beaches and the the tourist components of what they do. Louisiana is more of an industrial state. So I would say we have competitive advantages over states like Florida because we can generate the jobs that have been shipped off because of NAFTA, but trees and all the other chaotic trade relationships that have happened around the world over the last 50 years. You know, Louisiana and the nation has been de-industrialized over the last 50 years, and that's because of bad policy from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And you saw all of our manufacturing base, the rust belt, was created because of that deindustrialization. And what I'm enjoyed about watching the president, while it's chaotic sometimes, uh, but reindustrializing America, where our blue-collar workers, and you think about the poorest of the poor, the folks that just want to get out there, bootstrap, work hard, provide for their families, do what they do. If we can rebuild that base, that blue-collar America, where that is jobs, is manufacturing jobs, where the things that, you know, you don't have to have eight years in college or advanced degrees where you can just go out there and work and pull a hard day's work and make a paycheck. If we can reindustrialize America, which is happening right now, you see it in Louisiana with some of the manufacturing LNG and other things that are happening here. If we can do that, I think that you see our country transform. And I I enjoy the America First Policy because it's bringing us back to where we were probably in the 50s and 60s by way of jobs and opportunity for everyone, not just for you know the elites and the others that that you know want to feather the nest.

SPEAKER_02 49:06

So here we go off to uh Washington. Yeah. So what what's uh what do you see as major and I before before you came in, I looked it up, and I you know, I guess I should probably know this, but there's two hundred and eighteen uh Republican representatives, two hundred and fourteen Democrats. Pretty tight margins. What do you what do you anticipate the uh at the midterms? What do you think that number's gonna look like?

SPEAKER_00 49:33

You know, I'm optimistic that the Republicans still hold the House. Um, you know, we I've I've watched over the last year or two, you know, but between one ensuring that election integrity is there, two, the money that has been funneled or siphoned into NGOs that have supported different companies. I mean, look, the whole system, I you can tell it's corrupt. I mean, you can see over the last number of years with what has been exposed on all sides of the game, that this is not a healthy system.

SPEAKER_02 49:58

It's corrupt like how.

SPEAKER_00 49:59

I think financially it's corrupt. With the money that is funneled to NGOs and other groups that then go out and backdoor support campaigns. Um, I think that that that just is not a healthy system where you're taking federal tax dollars and redirecting them to non-uhgovernmental organizations that go out then in turn and set up campaign apparatus and support candidates. I think that is probably one of the most unhealthy things that's happened. Dollars that flow to foreign countries that then come back in and foreign supportive campaigns, that to me is just that is not a healthy system. I think individuals should have to go out and shake hands and raise money from in themselves and individual business owners and individuals to support campaigns, not take federal tax dollars, redirect them through other chains and then come back into America. That that is not a healthy system. So I think by cleaning those things up, by cleaning up our voter rolls, by having, you know, Americans vote in American elections that are that have been there, that that have citizenship, I think that is a healthy process for democracy. And I think that because of those things that are happening, that the Republicans have a chance to hold on to the House coming up in the next uh, but it's gonna be close either way. Uh I know that the next six months of policy wins, you know, you're starting to see the American economy pick up. We saw GDP numbers just this week at 2.2 percent, well over expectations. Inflation continues to soften from the Biden years of over 9% annualized to now the Trump years of of under 3%. And I could see that going down to one, one and a half, we hope, uh, because inflation is probably the number one issue that's impacting Americans right now. Prescription drugs, cost of groceries. I mean, just it has been uh we've had a 30, 40 percent increase in the cost of stuff because of the COVID and the chaos in COVID and the rampant government overspending and money printing, all the way to, you know, just trying to mitigate that and getting us back into parity where people have the ability to go out and buy a steak, uh, ground beef, vegetables, whatever it may take.

SPEAKER_02 51:52

No, this is anecdotal, but I go to the grocery store. I mean, I like to I like to cook a bit. I go to the grocery store and I buy groceries, and I can't see that it's less expensive to cook my own dinner than it is to take my family out to dinner.

SPEAKER_00 52:06

I do know that, you know, I was paying seven dollars for a dozen eggs about two years ago. And so there was a time that I was like, this is crazy, because I used to be able to pay, you know, two bucks and change for for eggs. And so we finally got that under control. I remember just uh a few short years ago, we were paying almost $4 a gallon in Louisiana, which is an oil producer and refinery over four bucks a gallon for gas. And now it's you know a couple of bucks a gallon. So there's some things, and if you look at one of the biggest drivers of cost of goods and services, it is oil and gas. If we've got oil and gas prices in a range now that I think are reasonable, there's transport costs and other down channel costs to get the stuff out of the ground and get them to the grocery store. That's coming down, which is why you're seeing core inflation come down. So I'm I'm hopeful with that, coupled with some reasonable monetary policy that you'll start to see through competition and supply and demand that prices begin to shift down even harder and faster with a growing economy that hopefully can keep up with the other uh, again, supply and demand and inflationary pressures.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

So one thing that I'm surprised hasn't come up kind of organically in this conversation is health care. So I'm just waiting on you to ask me what about healthcare. I'm ready to talk about it. What about healthcare? I mean, here's what I'm seeing, and I don't know if this is you know what you've man, and you're gonna have probably a more nuanced and accurate perception of what I'm about to talk about. But it seems like to me that insurance companies and the Obamacare re mandate to acquire health insurance has basically created like this, it's almost like a black market where doctors really don't get to charge the patients. So there's no but then the doctors bill the insurance company, but the insurance company has their special rate card. The rate card's different for every insurance company and every doctor. And it's like I don't think I don't necessarily think that the government should be involved in setting prices because I think that's a recipe for failure. But it's not a re it's like a it's so such a complicated scheme.

SPEAKER_00 54:11

Yeah. So Obamacare was one of the largest national disasters as it related to health care costs than has ever been created. That program alone doubled, if not tripled, the cost of health care over a period of years. And it's because of the the g games and schemes that were set up within it that were uh aimed and designed to drive money to, you know, a lot of uh whether it's a health plan or or other groups. Like it is a large company. It was a lot of it was. I mean, uh but but there were winners and losers in that. You saw small health plans, which I've worked for a health plan, I've worked with a physician group and I've worked with a hospital. So I've seen three different components of the healthcare market, and I've watched how that program has nearly bankrupted small, lean, well-run organizations and also almost bankrupted doctors because of the games and schemes that are played within that. Uh you saw the large corporations that are now owned by PBMs, and that's one thing that I've been working on and fighting for the last couple of years meaningful reform and PBMs, which are pharmacy benefit managers. They're the ones that have come in now and bought the health insurance companies. They bought doctors' groups, they're buying other healthcare assets, and they're funneling money out at every different level. So they're these big, they're big ATMs.

SPEAKER_02 55:19

It's like a ver well, there's like this massive vertical integration which is correct. You know, affinity and again um vanishes sort of in some ways, y'all were a pioneer in that.

SPEAKER_00 55:30

I mean I'm sure there were some other movers that did it before you, but that seemed to be like you were one of the first ones that we didn't own the pharmacy component of it when it comes, it comes to the pharmacy management. We always had to have a PBM. Those are the ones of the most profitable portions of the entity that siphoned out, you know, billions of dollars out of the healthcare system. We were set up as kind of like a mini ACO, accountable care organization that took, and you know, you had to, if you brought in a million dollars, you had to spend 85 to 90 percent of those dollars on health care, and then anything else is reinvestment in the company and or profit. Companies like Vantage only made a one to three percent profit each year. If you're in business, one to three percent profit is a heck of a slim margin. But what you see in these other PBMs, they create these vertically integrated organizations with 20 different subsidiaries, and they're shuffling money out at every different level in profitability. So when you do that as one of those vertically integrated companies, they can siphon money out that don't require what isn't, you know, most of these groups require, especially CMS, 80 to 85% spend of every healthcare dollar. Well, when you're siphoning money out in specialty pharmacy, when you're siphling money out at the uh, you know, the insurance level, when you're siphoning money out at all these other consulting group levels, you're way more than a um, you know, profitability at a 10 or 15% margin that some of these big dogs are doing. Uh in fact, it's such a criminal enterprise. I ran a bill last year that simplified and recreated transparency, reporting, also to pay our independent pharmacists fairly. And uh, they're already subverting the law on that. Uh, I've got another bill I'm running this year that will hopefully hold them accountable to the highest degree to break up some of the vertical integration. Uh, these are corrupt criminal enterprises that uh are not run fairly. They're hurting our individual pharmacists, they're hurting our individual doctors. Uh, and hopefully this will simplify some of our healthcare system and get it back to common sense.

SPEAKER_02 57:23

So, do you see this as a state issue or a federal issue?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

Both, which is one of the reasons why I'm running for Congress. Uh, you know, PBM reform and healthcare reform is something I've worked on in the state for six years. And having the ability to take the bills and the concepts that we've worked on at the state level to the federal level is it gives us just hands down an advantage over our competitors. Uh, some of the things we've worked on and rooting out inefficiencies in state government, call it doge now, but taking that to the federal level and working on bills and groups that are trying to do that, I think is part of uh a skill set that I've got. And then the tax reform that I've worked on with my colleagues, you know, lowering the personal income tax rate, working on, you know, trade policy. Being a business guy, I look to look at efficiencies to bring dollars into the to the state or to the businesses that we work in. And then being able to be efficient with those dollars. I think there's some more opportunities in working with the Trump administration on both trade policy and uh whether it's it's you know foreign policy by way of you know economic development. I think those are things that I'll bring to the the table that nobody else in this race can.

SPEAKER_02 58:29

You're smiling like I've said something novel, but I feel like I'm at, you know, this is like I feel like I'm at like front row of like well, this is like a boxing match, you know.

SPEAKER_00 58:38

And and you know, there's six competitors, I think, on the Republican side of the of the aisle uh that are battling for this, and some on the the Democrat side of the aisle. We're in a closed primary system this year. We've never done that. Well, in the last 50 years, we haven't done it. Since I've been alive, we haven't done it. So for voters on May 16th, they're gonna go to the polls. And if you're uh not a registered Republican or independent, you got to pick which party you're gonna, you know, party uh and uh party in or vote in. And so uh if you don't, if you're not registered Republican when you go to the polls, you're only gonna have a certain number of candidates. They're all Republicans on the ticket. So you need to be prepared for that. And this is an unusual cycle because we're doing the party primaries in May, and then the the runoff will be in June. And then fast forward, you're gonna have a Democrat and a Republican on the ticket in the fall, and that's all you're gonna have. So people have to get engaged now for these races and understand who these candidates are.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah, it seems that way to me. I mean, it seems like the real race is the primary.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

It's now.

SPEAKER_02 59:33

Yeah. I mean, I hate to say it, but I mean I don't I don't well, I mean, I I don't know if I hate that's probably not you know, I'm I think I'm a registered Republican, but I don't really I'm more Well, I need your vote and all your voters that are watching on the show here, I need your vote.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

It's important you get out on May 16th and vote. It's uh it's a big deal.

SPEAKER_02 59:51

Um but going back to health care. And and really this is something that I think you have a unique perspective on. Um at a federal level, where where do you see Congress and the Senate um taking steps to address, I guess, whatever should be corrected or how should we correct it?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:14

You need reforms not only in Medicare, in Medicaid, and in the commercial insurance markets. We still we have transparency bills that have been passed over the number of years, but I mean when you go to the hospital or go to a doctor's office for services, do they hand you a menu that say what things cost?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:28

It's worse than that. You don't even have any idea of what kind of doctor you're going to see.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

You know, we don't have a way to know like this doctor's really good. This doctor's garbage.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:39

There are so many things in our healthcare delivery system that you're just blind as a consumer. I think you know, you're hearing a lot of talk about putting the power into the consumer's hands by way of whether it's insurance premiums, instead of shuffling them to a big insurance company. If we put $500 in your healthcare account, you as a consumer, and you've got a healthcare card and you go out and you know that an MRI at one facility costs $6,000 and another facility at $600, you as a consumer are going to go, What? Well, they're two big machines. I know I'm gonna get the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:12

Well, is it the same thing though? That's my thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:14

Well, so you that's where the consumer, I mean, that's like buying a car. Do you know if you've got you know backup cameras and a radio CD40? Well, you know, that's where I think consumers have to be empowered to make better decisions. Over time, I think consumers ultimately, with the decision-making power, not wandering off into an abyss of healthcare chaos, they will be able to use with their incentives and their their brain power to be able to go in and figure out if I need an x-ray on my leg, I can go pay 80 bucks here or 800 over here. Which x-ray should I get?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

Yeah. And but and that's great for the x-ray equipment machine thing. I'm talking about what what and I'm as a profess, you know, I'm a professional. So as a professional, I'm imagining what a doctor must, you know, well, experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:03

My advice to everybody is get a good primary care doctor. There's nothing better in your life than having a primary, it's like a quarterback.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:09

But how would you pick him?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:10

So, well, that's where you talk to your friends and family. I mean, I I I know a bunch of primary care doctors because I recruited them for years. And I agree, no two doctors are are made the same, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:20

And I'm not trying to put anybody down anywhere.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:23

No, no, but it's it's just, you know, talking to people in your community that know good doctors. When you know a good doctor, and it's more about their bedside manner, how they communicate with you, if they're looking for services to refer you to, you know, if I'm you, I'd go see this, this, and this to get this service done. I think that relationship, there's two really important relationships in an individual's life with their healthcare sector. It's a relationship with their independent pharmacist, and it's a relationship with their primary care doctor. Make sure those are good relationships. Know those people well, trust them, talk to other people about them because those two relationships will guide your healthcare life and can be a lifesaver. Um, whether you're having to go to the emergency room or what have you, having the cell phone number of your doctors, those are big deals. Uh so I would I would make sure you start off well with those two things.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:09

So, and I'm this not disagreeing with what you just said, but it to me, this is the problem that I see. It's not a marketplace. And if it was a marketplace, you would have some doctors making ten million dollars a year and some doctors making a hundred thousand dollars a year.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

Well, that that's there's a capacity issue, especially in primary care. So primary care doctors as a patient population can only serve about a thousand to twelve hundred patients because you only have so much capacity through your clinic each year. Uh, and so it's not a true marketplace, it's limited by what you can fit into the funnel. Now, I do think that, you know, new technology is going to evolve that. And so having a more meaningful relationship with primary care doctors and how they get rewarded for that uh with innovative payment models by, you know, we were when I worked with the physician group, we were more like an ACO. Our physicians were paid based on the quality and outcomes. I think the only way healthcare systems can evolve in the future is doctors to be paid on, you know, keeping ER admissions low, meaning that doctor's taking a call from a patient and they're saying my blood pressure feels like it's spiking. They can say, well, take this medicine, do this intervention, and maybe that yeah, instead of sending them straight to the ER on something, that one little inaction can save three to five thousand dollars in the healthcare system. Or the doctor may say, come to my office right now versus running to the hospital right now and mitigating whatever damage might be happening with that patient. They may have to go to the ER, and that's fine.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:44

It's like the Larry Dunna backdoor system.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:46

Well, just those little touches in the healthcare system save tremendous amounts of money and increase quality exponentially. I've seen it over large swaths of lives. And so again, that's why I go back to we got to be growing as many primary care doctors, thank God for VCOM and others that are that are working on LSU, that are working on growing primary care doctors. But those relationships can save just hundreds, billions of dollars in the healthcare delivery system, which is why I'm such a big proponent of investing in primary care.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:13

Well, and I I just I'm you know, I'm maybe belaboring the point a bit, but it just seems to me that and and and I'm not, you know, I'm just in I'm in my own business and I'm in my own life and I just see things and experience things. And I have a lot of clients that receive treatment from physicians. You know, basically I represent people that it's pretty much all about their treatment. You know, not and and I don't do medical I'm not talking about medical negligence claims, I'm talking about like car accident claims where somebody has significant injuries.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:46

And well, access to care, and that is something I have fought tooth and nail for. You know, it's crazy that we have a system that's set up that instead of somebody, and whether it's a car wreck or any other injury, a workplace injury, their first move is not go to a doctor and Get fixed. Sometimes it's go and be quarantined in a legal environment when their first thing they need to do is stabilize the injury and get treatment immediately. Like it's crazy to me that we push people off in these administrative processes when the very first move they should have is go see a doctor, stabilize the injury.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:16

Well, there's a couple of reasons why that happens. The first is they go to the hospital and they wait there for six hours.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:22

Which is ridiculous. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:23

Okay. I mean, that's like what I rather do. Like, is there an option B? Let's go talk to somebody that knows about this. And that that's why they show up to a lawyer's office for for the most part. Or like there are some people that are involved in these accidents and they don't know, like, they don't maybe they they don't feel 100, but they don't feel like they need neurosurgery right away.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:46

Uh but they might. But well, they don't Which is why they need to get to a medical professional and get stabilized. The first interaction is is the the really the least expensive action, and that is primary care. The quicker you get to stabilization or you're evaluated by a medical professional, the more quickly you get to healing. Our workman's comp system is one of the most gamed systems I've ever seen where patients don't get stabilized immediately. And like if it's an eye injury, you need to go have a wash and something else. You need to be stabilized quickly because you could lose the ability to your eyesight or some other halt the process.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:20

Yeah, halt the process.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:21

If there's a if there's you know a welding shard in your eye, or if there's, you know, you've got a puncture wound or something that might you don't have tetanus in it, just all those little things, time does matter. And so mitigating that, the more you do from a medical intervention more quickly or stabilization, the longer, uh, the less long-term impacts of what your injury might be.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:43

Yeah. No, I agree. I agree with I agree with that. They're not. But access is your issue.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:47

And that's that's the problem, is if you go and wait 24 hours in an emergency room because you know you Well, and if you got like a little back pain, but uh, admitably it'll be like tomorrow. Little turns into a lie.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:57

Yeah. And so it they they say, well, I'm not going to do that right now. And then all of a sudden two weeks goes by and it's gotten worse.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:03

It's and and that's part of the issue is just stabilizing. There's there's logic and there's some real simple things that we can do that are logic in the delivery system that that'll save the and this saves hundreds of billions of dollars a year if you just implement small little solutions up front that save you know big, big financial impacts long run.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:23

Well, and I guess my la my last thing about the healthcare thing is this, is that I think that as provide for providers, for individual providers and provider groups, that I think they should be able to dictate their rates or their charges or whatever for the services that they render in a fair way. Like not saying that there should be some sort of discrimination that shouldn't be happening there in a fair way to say regardless of what your insurance is gonna pay, this is my charge.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:55

So I have fought tooth and nail, especially in our Medicaid program, for doctors to be paid fairly. The more and reasonable rate you pay a physician, the more capacity they can open up in their clinic to see more patients, bring on other nurse practice, whoever it is that they've got in their system to work with them to see more patients. But for fair payment, um, one I've also fought and we've funded uh primary care physician tuition reimbursement. Uh so if you're in Louisiana and you locate in a rural market or a tough place to get health care providers, that will pay back your tuition just to get you into a place that doesn't have a doctor. That saves the healthcare system billions of dollars when you populate communities that don't have health care with doctors that are like that. And then, like you suggest, you know, the better job you do as a doctor, as a medical professional, you should be rewarded by that. Now, there just if we did the savings methodology, that if we got people in front of a doctor and save the healthcare system money, we need to share some of that money that's saved with those medical providers. I have advocated for that. We used to have that at Affinity Health Group and our health plans. We rewarded doctors that focused on communicating with specialists, communicating with hospitals, and coordinating care. Coordination of care saves 10 to 20 percent of the health care dollar. We're spending billions of dollars a year paying a doctor a little bit more because they're coordinating that care is very reasonable from a strategic standpoint, and there needs to be a national model that does more than that.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:19

There's effort involved in that coordination. Absolutely. So they should be compensated.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:22

And right now, they're not compensated for much of that coordination. They're they're compensated because our healthcare system's broken. They're compensated the more heads they get into that chair right there that they can do an examination on and then go next, that's how it's modeled right now. That does not create value for the individual. That creates value for a transaction. And this is not a transactional game. This is a lifetime game, a relationship game, and that's how healthcare should be based.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:45

And if you look around, there are an awful lot of providers that are no longer accepting new patients. And the reason is because their book is full.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:52

Absolutely, 1,200 to 1,500 patients.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:55

And if you have a full book, you should be getting paid a little bit more. Which means there ought to be like, and I get the insurance company should only have to pay a certain amount, but maybe now it's time the doc for the doctor to be allowed to say, okay, yeah, we take your insurance and you're also going to pay, you know, 15% surcharge or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:12

Well, that that's where the uh the policymakers come in. Having a shared savings arrangement that working, you know, if you represent a thousand, two thousand lives and that annual cost is this, and you as a doctor work with those patients to move them to generic medications that they pay less and the system pays less. If you can work with that patient to do some type of physical therapy to keep them out of longer-term, more broad surgeries, that saves the healthcare dollars. All those little interactions, uh, whether it's working with a psychiatrist or a psychologist to mitigate medications they may not need, or look to drug interactions, to work with the pharmacy benefit managers to ensure that the patients are are maintained on their medicine, their diabetes medicines, their, you know, all their AONCs and things are in order, all those little maintenance components can translate into lower costs for the healthcare system. And that's what the doctor should be rewarded on are savings within the system, not cutting call care out for patients, but managing overall care and reducing cost and increasing quality.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:12

And giving advice that a patient can immediately use to improve their health situation. That's the goal. Um Well, it's the healthcare thing is interesting to from my standpoint. Um have you had any dealings with the No Surprises Act or uh federal IDR?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:35

So are you talking about surprise billing? Surprise medical billing? Yeah. So I testified uh almost 15, 20 years ago at the State House. I remember going between uh in front of Dr. Heitmeyer, who was uh the chairman of the Senate uh health and welfare committee at the time, about surprise medical billing. When you have, you know, these air ambulance bills of $50,000, $70,000 when the Medicare reimbursable for that same service is $1,800. Like to me, it's criminal what happens to people when they're in their most weak and weary positions and they get this chaotic medical billing, or they go to a doctor's office that decides they won't want to be in a network and they get a $10,000 bill for a $600 service. That to me is criminal. I know they've they've passed some federal rules, we've passed some rules in the state, but you know, if the people are paying these crazy bills, they just need to one, call their insurance company and say, y'all handle this. The insurance companies should do a better job at advocating for their patients. Uh, for those insurance companies that don't, uh, just call my office and we will call those insurance companies and bark at them for you because they're supposed to be doing that. Your insurance plans should be the ones that are protecting you from these heinous actors that are out charging you chaotic amounts of money.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:43

Well, I think that I think that's pretty much gone now. I mean, I don't think the doctor can do that. It's not gone. It still happens.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:48

No, you still have bad actors that are out there doing this. There's some, you know, you have specific hospitals that'll hire outside groups to run their ERs so they can still balance bill you. You still have other medical groups that are doing this.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:59

This is not a uh So the No Surprises Act, though, that's really more like that's actually to protect the patient, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:05

It is.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:06

So this is my maybe.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:08

Your insurance company should be suing those providers because of that federal law that's on the books, but right now it still happens. They're buckets. It's not everybody, but one to three percent of the actors out there are bad actors, and they're gonna be bad actors no matter what happens to you.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:21

What about the provider though? I mean, you know, I'm not saying that I disagree necessarily with the like the the helicopter flight for the you know the per the you know small business owner that you know is making ends meet, but maybe just barely, and he gets a twenty thousand dollar air flight bill or whatever that you know maybe he needed, maybe he didn't need. Maybe like the state trooper made the decision about whether he needed it or didn't need it or whatever. You know, it happened. Um but what like for the out of network um it still happens. I'm talking about for the out of network patient that's with the maybe he's with the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Iowa. Okay, and he goes to the hospital and receives you know life-saving uh cardiothoracic surgery that was necessary. And then the insurance company's like, Oh, well, your doctor's out of network, so here's your here's his six hundred dollars for the 17-hour surgery that he had, and have fun with all the things.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:25

So I'd pick up the phone and call your legislator if I was getting impacted by something like that. I do it all the time. If Blue Cross does that in another state to a patient, I say, look, here's your choice, Blue Cross. Pay the claim that's appropriate, or else I'll run a bill next year that requires much more heinous things than what you're doing, because there's a fair and balanced way to handle healthcare.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:43

Well, the no surprises act, and that's really what I was asking about.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:46

It's supposed to.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:47

It's supposed it has. I mean, it's they've got hundreds of thousands of claims through there. Sure. It's basically it created a, and just for people at home that don't know what the No Surprises Act is, it created an arbitration system that's mandatory for out-of-network providers with uh patient that treated patients that were out of network. Okay. And anyway, the whole idea is to take it out off the patient's lap and to give the provider a means to get fairly compensated for whatever market he's in, for whatever service he's provided, in a way that's fair and straightforward for the provider, so that the provider doesn't look at this guy that's from Iowa and say, sorry about your problem, but uh you're just gonna have to die.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:33

I absolutely wish everybody followed the law, but they don't. And so that's part of the problem is you still have providers out there that are gonna bend the rules to for their own benefit. And so we don't have a perfect system yet. That's why you have your your policymakers, that's why you have your lawyers to help uh address those particular concerns. So call your lawyer, call your legislator, and if they can't help you, then I guess nobody can.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:55

Well, hey, I appreciate you coming on here. Um, and uh, you know, I would just open it up for you. I know you don't have a lot of time, but what do you feel like people really should know about uh what you're trying to do uh in this fifth congressional district race?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:10

Yeah, so it's a it's a really tight time frame. We're trying to raise a lot of money. Go to michaeleccles.com to make your contributions, or if you if you want to support or be involved, we'd love to have you. Or you can call me 318-366-7370. You know, we've got a we've got a mission we're on. We're we're working at stuff at the state level, have been for years. Hope to translate that to bring resources back to the state, whether it's through infrastructure. Uh it's a big district, over 20 parishes, uh, from Washington Parish to Morehouse Parish. So all the way up the boot and up the Mississippi River. Uh, these people uh that I get to represent every day, it's an absolute opportunity and pleasure. Uh, it's been great to serve in this market and this region, and I I look to do that in a bigger way and help bring hope and opportunity to our our state.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:50

Well, I certainly appreciate that and uh appreciate the efforts that you've done for uh for not only our friends and neighbors, but for you know, things that have a real impact here in Monroe. And uh thank you for coming on and sharing your time with us. You've been very generous.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:04

Thank you, John, and look forward to seeing you in a future uh race at some point to uh jump on into the the mud fight and have a little fun with us.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:11

There's too much bullshit.