Commission Six Eight
Covering today's politics and current events through the lens of history and the Bible.
Commission Six Eight
Interview with Senator Bill Cassidy
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One quick stop at an AT&T store in Baton Rouge led to a liver transplant that saved my dad’s life, and Senator Bill Cassidy remembers the details like it happened yesterday. We start with that personal story, including how a transplant denial through the VA was challenged, what it looks like when someone is in end-stage liver failure, and what it feels like to see the same person six months after a successful transplant. It’s a reminder that healthcare isn’t a talking point when it’s your family sitting by the phone waiting for a call from Houston.
From there, we get into policy with Cassidy wearing two hats: US senator and practicing physician. He breaks down his MVP agenda to lower healthcare costs by putting “money in your pocket” for out-of-pocket expenses and pushing real price transparency so patients can compare costs before they commit to care. We also talk surprise medical billing, why the No Surprises Act matters, and how upfront pricing for elective procedures can protect families from financial shock.
We then tackle harder national issues: hearings on chemical abortion drugs like mifepristone and the debate over restoring safeguards such as in-person dispensing and ultrasound confirmation, plus what success looks like in the fentanyl and opioid crisis through the HALT Fentanyl Act and the SUPPORT Act. We close with border security, illegal trafficking, and Cassidy’s pitch to Louisiana voters focused on infrastructure funding, coastal restoration, flood protection, and broadband access. If this conversation made you think, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it.
You are listening to Commission 68.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to a special edition of Commission 68. I'm your host, Randy Millette, and this morning I have with me Senator Bill Cassidy. Senator, thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_01Hey Randy, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Senator Cassidy, your political career has been marked by significant achievements from your service in the Louisiana
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_02State Senate and your time representing Louisiana's sixth congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives to your election to the United States Senate in 2014, your re-election in 2020, and now your leadership as chairman of the Senate Health Committee, where you have driven efforts to lower health care costs, advance mental health reform, and secure coastal restoration projects for Louisiana families. And later I'd like to touch on some policy topics and priorities, but first I'd like to start with something more personal that I don't believe you've actually shared publicly before. On Christmas Eve in 2013, you walked into an ATT store in Baton Rouge and had an encounter with my cousin who was working at the store. Throughout the conversation, you learned that my dad, my cousin's uncle, had hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver and was in need of a liver transplant. However, due to recent tests, they deemed him as a bad candidate for a liver, and he was removed from the transplant list. You learned all this from my cousin at the ATT store,
The AT&T Encounter That Changed Everything
SPEAKER_02and you instructed my cousin to have my dad call you. So I wanted to ask, first of all, how much of this story do you remember? And do you remember what happened next?
SPEAKER_01I remember everything about that story. It was a total God thing. A total God thing. Absolutely. Now, for the people who are listening, I'm a liver doctor. Uh the technical name is a hepatologist, but if you say, tell someone you're a hepatologist, they think you either do snakes or venereal disease. And so uh so uh um so 2013, I go into the ATT store, and I think I was with my daughter, um getting her phone, and and we're just talking, your cousin and I. And and you know, he's a good salesman. He's a really good salesman. I'm sure he upsells sold us. But still, you inquire, you you learn about your customer, uh, your doctor, what kind of doctor? A liver doctor, really. Well, I got an uncle. Tell me the problem. And your father, your your father was being seen through the VA, and they had denied his transplant on something that I had never done, I had never seen a transplant denied on before about. And it was interesting because I have referred a lot of patients for liver transplants, done a lot of workups for liver transplantation, you know, maybe 400. I could imagine that through the course of my life. And so when I said I'd never seen a single one, maybe more than 400, that had been um denied because of this, I'm speaking from a wealth of experience. And he gets me the records, I think he had been seen uh in Houston VA. And in fact, I know he had been seen at Houston VA, and they had denied him on a heart condition that was supposed to be uh meaning that he couldn't get his liver transplant. And I said, that's just not true. I mean, you need to get that checked out. And what I don't quite remember is whether he went to Oxner or Oxner had already evaluated him. But somehow um I think there was an evaluation there which confirmed my belief. I had your dad send me the records. You know, send me your records, Randy. Your father's name, Randy too. I looked at the records and I still didn't see the reason why there should be. So then I'm I'm a congressman then. So I contact the VA in Houston. I say, this patient is not in my congressional district, but he's in my state. He's a liver doctor, he's a liver patient, and I'm a liver doctor. And I've reviewed the records, and I don't see any validity in him not being, excuse me, him not being transplanted. Boom! He gets transplanted. Uh amazing. And by the way, when I saw your dad, I saw him before his transplant. And for those on your podcast, if you've never seen an end-stage liver patient, they are swollen. They are more yellow than you can imagine a human being can be. They are confused. Um I mean, I could keep going, but they look like someone you've never seen before. And the great thing, Randy, I saw your dad like six months after his transplant. I had no clue, no clue who the guy was, because there was no fluid in his belly, there was no yellowness in his skin, he was sharp as a tack. I mean, the guy looked like a normal human being. Um and uh and I'm like, who is this guy? This is Randy Millet. He had his transplant, he looks fantastic. So anyway, uh just to say all that, uh, I remember the story vividly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I I remember when we got the call, uh, it was actually December 5th, in 2014. We get the call from Houston. We had to pack up in the middle of the night and drive to Houston, and he was rushed right into surgery, got his transplant. Um, and that's all a result of that one chance encounter of you walking into the ATC store, and credit to you, not just hearing a story and going about your life, but actually getting involved in doing something.
SPEAKER_01So I Well, Randy, I'm gonna disagree with one thing.
SPEAKER_02Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_01That was not a chance meeting. That was God ordained.
SPEAKER_02Amen.
SPEAKER_01My daughter had warned me out to get her a new phone on the exact day that your cousin was working there and needed to make a good sale.
SPEAKER_02Well, I wanted to bring that up and give you an opportunity to share that and and share that with the listeners because you know, people think that they know politicians and people might think that they know Senator Bill Cassidy, but I wanted to share, you know, the story about uh my dad's friend that that saved his life.
SPEAKER_01So Yeah. I'll say one more thing. Um it's just the way I'm wired. Um every day I wake up and I think, what can I do for my country, my state, and the people who live there? And and that's just what I focus on. And when something like that stumbles across, it's almost like, Randy, if you were going down the road and you saw an elderly person trip off the curb, you would help her back to her feet. Of course. Of course. And this way, it was a sense of me bringing my training that God had blessed me with, with the responsibil responsibilities and the influence of the office in which I was holding to call the VA. And when the VA gets a call from a member of Congress, they take that call a little bit more seriously. And then if the member of Congress happens to be a liver doctor, uh, they're gonna take it a little bit more seriously yet. And so it all worked out. When what what year what so I saw your dad that was uh the 2013 2013 and he got transplanted when?
SPEAKER_02December 5th, 2014.
SPEAKER_01A year later. A year later. I'm surprised, I'm surprised your dad lived that long. He looked so awful.
SPEAKER_02So me too, and my mom. And you know, he's still pastoring today. He preaches every Sunday, and you know, every life that he touches and every message that he preaches, you you've got a part in that.
SPEAKER_01No, isn't that great?
SPEAKER_02Isn't that great?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02All right, well, if you don't mind, I'd like to um, I know you don't have much time, but I do want to get into some policy uh questions for you. And I'll start off as chairman of the help committee and a practicing physician, which we'll touch on, you've unveiled the money and value for patients agenda or the MVP agenda. What are the most important reforms in that plan and how do you plan to advance them uh in 2026?
SPEAKER_01So, Randy, let's just put a let's just put a real point on it. People
The MVP Plan To Lower Costs
SPEAKER_01that they have a bucket of money in their household budget, and they pay for groceries, gasoline, and health care. Now, right now, all three of those are really high. And so what I'm trying to do is relieve the pressure on that family budget by doing something about health care. What can you do about health care? You know, President Trump uh and I were both saying about a year ago we should be giving money to the patient and not to the insurance company. Uh now, why would that be? When you give the money to the insurance company to insure you, the patient, they take at least 20% of it for profit and overhead. Right. So you get a uh $1,000 to the insurance company, there's going to be $800 spent on your care. If we give $1,000 to you, $1,000 will be spent on your care. So you're already getting more money that way. So what my plan is, is for middle income families getting insurance through their employer, let's give them a thousand, let's give them, well, a family of four would get $2,000, probably, or about that. $2,000 that would bypass the insurance company, go into an account, money in your pocket, M for MVP, money in your pocket to pay your out-of-pocket cost. Next, um, we're pushing hard for price transparency, and I've already passed legislation for price transparency. And so for the price transparency, for the price transparency, if you pick up your phone, your daughter has an earache, you go to your app, urgent care centers near me, which one has the best price for a routine visit for an earache? Oh, this one's 50 bucks and that one's 150 bucks. So with the money in your pocket, M, you get value for that money, the V. Money in your pocket brings value to the patient, the NVP plan. That just starts to decrease the pressure on your budget. Um, you could also, therefore, because you have money for those upfront costs, get a less expensive premium. And so it's estimated that we could save three to five thousand dollars per family on the cost of being insured with this system. And so bypassing the insurance company, giving you the dollar with the value for you, the patient, boom, that's that's let's help out your finances.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And and not just that, but uh more value for the patient. And you've also worked on issues um like surprise medical billing, right? Yeah, no surprise act.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so surprise medical billing is something that I worked on for two years. President Trump signed into law. It used to be that uh, for example, you, the patient, would go to the emergency room and it would be on your insurance plan as being in network. But the hospital doctors would not be on network, the EKG machine would not be in network, um, the radiologist
Surprise Billing And Upfront Pricing
SPEAKER_01would not be in network. And you get all these bills related to your care, even though the hospital was in your network. We change that. If you go to the emergency room and it's an emergency, then boom, everything is considered as if it were in network. Also, we begin to require, I'm smiling, I'll tell you why, uh, it'll come clear. Begin to require that that hospitals tell you the cost of an elective procedure before you get the elective procedure. Uh so for so you go for a colonoscopy. You're too young for it, but you know, imagine you're 50 years old, you need a colonoscopy, you're 45. And you go in there and you've taken your prep, you're already, which means that you've taken everything to give you diarrhea, and you're hoping everything's out, but you're not sure. And you're we've got a gown on, but your rear end is exposed. Yes, you're beneath the sheet, and they want you to sign a bunch of forms right before you have your colonoscopy. One of them says, in the bad old days, you would pay for anything the insurance company wouldn't. Now, they could be charging you $12,000 for the colonoscopy, the insurance company pays $2,000 and you're stuck with $10,000 because you signed a farm when you're butt naked about to have diarrhea going in for a colonoscopy.
SPEAKER_02They could be charging you $12,000 for the game.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we thought that.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01And so that was so they're required to tell you up front, this is how much it's going to cost, this is how much the insurance company would would is is going to cover. And you can say, wait a second, that's too expensive. Is there a cheaper place to have my colonoscopy? Oh, yeah. Down the street, I'll take you there. It's going to cost you 2,000 bucks to wash with the insurance company.
SPEAKER_02All right. So this is a topic I've I really want to get your take on. Um, and it's coming up recently. So you've led hearings and investigations into chemical abortion drugs, um, like mifepristone. Am I saying that right? Yep, yep, yep. Um, calling for the restoration of safeguards such as in-person dispensing and a full FDA safety review. Um, and now we see this case working its way up the courts. So my question is, how how do you anticipate this playing out and and what result would you like to see?
SPEAKER_01So I'll give a little
Abortion Pill Safeguards And Court Fights
SPEAKER_01context. Sure. I'm pro-life. So uh but but what I'm saying would be acknowledged by people who are not pro-life. That it used to be that if somebody was going to get a chemical abortion drug prescribed for them, they would have to see the doctor in person. The doctor would do an ultrasound to make sure that the patient, the woman who's pregnant, uh, would be appropriate for the for the medication. Um, you're not supposed to take it after 11 weeks. Why? Because the baby in the womb gets so big that if you take it at week 20 and and the abortion pill causes the death of the baby, it can't get through the cervix. And you end up having to have, you know, hemorrhage or infection or a trip to the emergency room, but you're not supposed to take it after a certain number of weeks of pregnancy. Um what has happened is that some states allow abortion drugs to be prescribed without the doctor ever seeing the patient. So the ultrasound is never done. No one knows how old or how big that fetus is. Sometimes a boyfriend or a mother is getting the pills and forcing or tricking the woman who's pregnant into taking the medicine. Wow. So you combine it. There's lawsuits about this, by the way. So the boyfriend doesn't want the pregnancy, gets the pill, sneaks it in her food. Um, but she's week 20. And so now not only does she have a dead baby in her womb, the the baby's too big to get through her cervix, and she has to go to the emergency room with infection or hemorrhage with potential complications. That's what's happening now. We're trying to stop that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and like I said, we saw it's um working its way through the courts, and I believe SCOTUS just put another stay on it. But interesting to see how that and and that's a huge issue to me. Coming up to the midterms, that's one of the key things that I've been focusing on. And I've been saying if if the right loses the midterms, we're in for a whole nother abortion fight and uh other things. So I'd like to move on with uh the whole fentanyl act and the support act. Now law. How do you measure success in combating the opioid and fentanyl crisis in Louisiana and the nation and what more is needed?
SPEAKER_01So so you measure success by having fewer people dying from fentanyl.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Now, in a sense, if you have fewer people dying, that means fewer people are getting fentanyl. Uh now the two bills you mentioned are bills that I wrote that President Trump signed
Fentanyl Laws And Border Enforcement
SPEAKER_01into law four or five months ago. Uh I lose track of time. One, the HALT Fentanyl Act gives law enforcement more tools to fight against the cartels, bringing fentanyl into our country. The Support Act, the Support Act gives support for those patients, those fellow Americans who have serious mental illness and addiction because they often go together. And so, one, you're going after the cartels, two, you're helping the patient. We have seen, because of these bills and other things we've done, like controlling the border, the number of deaths from fentanyl down, I'm told, by as much as 60%. So we are making progress in addressing fentanyl. One fentanyl death is one too many. That's right. Uh, but still, we're making progress, and we want to not just stop the death, we also want to stop the addiction, we want to stop the drug from coming into our country. Uh and that's our big push, and we're getting success. Working, frankly, President Trump has signed into law on my bills. I've supported him on his efforts to control the border. We're making progress.
SPEAKER_02So you've backed efforts on border security, including the Lake and Riley Act. How effective do you think current immigration enforcement changes have been, and what additional measures do you support?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so clearly it's been effective. Under Joe Biden's open border policy, we had like 10 million people come in four years, crossing the border illegally. Uh with President Trump and with the Republican Congress supporting him, giving the resources necessary, that's been cut almost to zero. It's just incredible.
SPEAKER_02Incredible.
SPEAKER_01Um and so, and by the way, human trafficking was involved, drug trafficking was involved, all that has been addressed. Um and so we've made a lot of progress. There is still a lot of illegal goods being shipped in. Now, when you ship in something illegally, that's an illegal good that steals jobs from the American worker. Instead of buying something from an American factory, you end up buying something shipped in illegally. They don't pay taxes on it. Uh it's it's it's made with labor, which undercuts our labor. So I would like to broaden what we're doing from just stopping people from coming in, which we've succeeded, getting the criminals out, which we're succeeding, but also stopping the illegal goods, which is a way that the drug cartels uh make a lot of money. It's a way that undercuts American jobs. I'm all about better paying jobs and more jobs for the American worker. I think that's the next thing we do.
SPEAKER_02Again, Senator Cassie, I can only imagine how busy you are, and and and thank you for your time. Lastly, as you are well aware to our listeners, we have the primary coming up May 16th. And I'd like to give you an opportunity um to just tell us how important it is for everyone to get out to vote and to make your case to Louisiana voters.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I really appreciate Randy being on with you, and of course, again, a special connection with your family. I always will have. Um, this election is about the present and the future of Louisiana. Who has worked most
Louisiana Results And Get Out The Vote
SPEAKER_01effectively to make our state a better place and who will continue to work effectively, who has a proven track record of delivering? That candidate is me. Why do I say that? Look at what I've done. In one bill alone, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I've brought $13.5 billion, billion with a B dollars to our state, uh $6.2 billion of that for roads and bridges, actually, even more because we've brought more sense. Um, hundreds of millions of dollars to decrease risk of flooding, hundreds of millions of dollars for coastal restoration. For example, the levy being built between New Orleans and Laplace. You see it off the I-10. I got $300 million for. The levy in the Bayou region, $600 million for the Morganza to the Gulf, but also for the ports and for water and for sewer. Uh most recently, the Trump administration released $1.35 billion from that bill that I negotiated to make sure that everyone has access to high-speed affordable internet. Think of all the jobs being created. Now, my opponents, the two people running against me, opposed a bill that brought us $13.5 billion. Think about that. They opposed a bill that has brought us good paying jobs, um, more good paying jobs, and addressing issues such as risk of flooding, and I could go down the list. I've worked well with President Trump. He has signed into law four bills that I either wrote or negotiated, and they're part of a bigger bill over the last several months. My opponents have never had a single bill signed into law. Think about that. The Congresswoman has never had a single bill signed into law. I've had dozens, including four in the last several months by President Trump. I have delivered for Louisiana. Now, some people want to focus on the past. They don't like me because of something I've done. Well, you're always going to find something that somebody does you don't like. But if you focused on the present and the future, and who's going to make our state a place where your children and grandchildren, where you are more likely to find success, then I've been delivering for our state. So, Randy, thank you for allowing me to make that pitch. The election is this Saturday. If you're no party, you can still vote in the Republican primary. You just need to ask for a Republican ballot when you go in.
SPEAKER_02Very important to know again, May 16th. Make sure you get out and vote, vote in primary. Even if you're no party, you can ask for a Republican ballot and vote in the primary. And Senator Cassidy, thank you again for your time and good luck. Thank you, Randy. Appreciate it, man. Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_00This has been Commission Six, Eight.