Latest / Breaking The Meta / He Watched a Man Die Because Insulin Got Too Expensive — Now He's Running for Congress
Transcript
- Breaking The Meta: you you Hello everyone. And welcome to breaking the meta. My name is Mike Winson. Today we are sitting down with Bernard Taylor, who's running for Florida's 21st district. so excited. First time I've actually gotten to interview someone who's running in Florida. So this is going to be a great interview. ⁓ Bernard, thank you for being here today. Well, thank you for having me very much. it. Hopefully I live up to Florida man standards. So the first thing that I like to do with everyone who's running for Congress is for people that aren't in Florida, could you let people know what is entailed in Florida's 21st district? Absolutely. So Florida 21st district consists of three counties, Palm Beach County, Martin County, and St. Lucie County, Florida. Major cities include city of Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens, some parts of West Palm Beach, Stewart, Florida, Jensen Beach, Fort Pierce, and Port St. Lucie. So pretty big district. Like said, covers across three counties and about a little bit over a million people. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. All right. So first thing, would you mind telling us a little about yourself, a little bit about yourself and why you decided to run for Congress? Absolutely. So I've been in Florida all my life. I was born and raised down in Miami until I was about 11. Then I eventually moved up to the Treasure Coast area here when I was about 12 years old, the area. consists of Florida 21. ⁓ Third, third or fourth, fourth generation Floridian is crazy. My family's been here that long. But through and through, man, I grew up here. I love it here. I love my home. I know it gets a bad rap across the nation and other places. But for those of us here, this is a great place to live or it can be a great place to live if we get the right type of leadership. Yeah, I'm a firefighter paramedic here in my district. I've been working for the fire department here for about five years now. I've been in the fire service almost six years in total. And again, what made me decide to run is just my life of service and seeing some of the things that I see in the back of my ambulance and on calls as I'm working. You know, I get to see ⁓ the worst parts of our society, the worst parts of how people are living, whether that's, you know, the people who have to call 911 to go to the emergency room to use it as their primary care physician. simply because they can't afford healthcare on their own. Some of homes that I go into that are dilapidated, run down and seeing families have to live in these homes in order to survive because that's all they can afford. And the system that's designed to help those families that are just trying to get afloat, get their head above water, it just does not seem to be working for them. And it's frustrating because there's really nothing I can do in my role as a firefighter besides make sure you're safe and get you over to the hospital. I felt like that there was more that I can do. I felt like the people that I served didn't have a voice and the voices that they do have aren't being heard, aren't being listened to. So I figured why not be that guy to come in and be a voice for those people, someone that will listen to them, someone that will fight for them and always put them first. get politicians now who, they talk a good game, but from what I've seen over my 37 years of life, There's really never been a person that I can be like, you know what? That's, that's, that's a real one. So I wanted to that person. Well, to go along with that a little bit, ⁓ one of the biggest issues that we, that I think a lot of people, the frustrations that a lot of people have in regards to politicians as a whole is this idea of accountability or the lack thereof. ⁓ and that's a Republican Democrat, right? Left up down. Doesn't matter where you're talking about. So my question is, what does accountability look like to you? What does accountability look like for your constituents in regards to you? And how do you see accountability going forward for Congress? Well, that's the thing. Like with my job, accountability is absolutely crucial because accountability costs people their lives if you're not accountable, if you're not held to a high standard. If you're not on If you're not willing to be accountable to those of you who you serve, basically, ⁓ it's literally being out there, being in the community like I have been over the past almost year now, ⁓ being front facing, being out in the community, talking with my constituents, listening to their problems, listening to their concerns, actually listening, active listening, you know, those techniques that they teach you when you're in elementary school. Yeah. practicing those things and not necessarily being someone that does all the talking. think one of my best qualities is that when I'm out here, I don't, I don't, I'm not trying to talk to people. I actually want to hear what they want to, what they have to say and kind of, you know, figure out how I can help them, how I can be of best use to them. And I feel like right now, especially here in my district with my current congressman, I think he's held like one group of town halls in the decade. He's almost been in office. You're not the, you're not the first time I've heard that. So there, there is no accountability when you're not held. to a high standard when you're not held to be accountable simply because of the area you are in and the party affiliation that you have, you kind of just coast in the office every two years because people are so tribal in their thoughts of, he's on my, he represents my team. had to vote for him instead of actually looking like, wait, like I have, I've yet to see this guy. You know, I don't get to talk with him. My calls get ignored. That type of thing. There's It's funny. had one guy tell me in the city of Fort Pierce, which in the northern part of our district, he tried to have a conversation with our current congressman and he flat out told him, ⁓ I don't come to Fort Pierce. Yeah, I don't come to Fort. I don't come to an area in my district. ⁓ my goodness. So that is, that is completely unacceptable. And again, that goes back to what you asked me. It's about accountability. You got to be held to a higher standard and you got to be held accountable. And it is up to us as a people to hold them accountable. If again, we allow these people to just coast in office every two years, why would I feel I need to be accountable for you to you if I know you're just going to put me back in my job? So when you walk around your district, obviously you've lived there for a while, so you probably understand it really well as well. But when you go around and talk to people, what are the common pain points? What are the common things that most people in your district talk about that they hope that you could help them? help your district with if you were in office. Three main things here again is cost of living. Florida's affordability crisis is out of control. Young people don't see a future for themselves here. They don't ever see themselves buying a home and they're actually leaving our state in record numbers over the past couple of years just because they don't see the future for them here. Our state has turned into a basically, if you already are established, come to our state is great for you. It's not a state where if you're trying to build yourself into something that's not what we have turned into over the past couple of years. Then you're talking about healthcare. We have a huge senior population in Florida, obviously. So a lot of our, a lot of my constituents, a lot of people are worried about, you know, just being able to afford their healthcare, afford their medicines, afford their prescriptions, know, being able to go see a primary care physician so they can catch a problem before it becomes too big of a problem that puts them in a medical debt. And then we are a coastal city. We're right on the water. So our waterways are extremely vital to our economy. the fact that, you know, again, my current congressman runs on being the clean water guy, but we haven't had clean water in 10 years. It is, it is a huge, huge problem. And that goes back again to that accountability. Our lake that funnels into the waterways down here, Lake Okeechobee over the past, I know if you've seen it, but recently it was voted the dirtiest lake in America. Wow. Yes. And all that water gets funneled down into our district and it doesn't get funneled into the upscale neighborhoods. It gets funneled through the low income neighborhoods and the neighborhoods that unfortunately get overlooked and get overshadowed. that leads to dirty water, that leads to health problems from the pollutants that are in that water that evaporated to the air around for those people in the community. So it just causes a whole bunch of problems. We, again, we don't have someone that's actually doing the work that needs to be done in order to make sure that our waterways are clean. People are having healthcare and we can afford to live here. When we look at politics just in general in the United States, ⁓ regardless of whether the reality is there that we're, no matter what party we've affiliated with, we're all kind of dealing with the same stuff. There's a feeling from a lot of people that there's a great amount of division in the sense of at least the identity politics side of things. ⁓ When you go around and you start and you talk to people in your district, when you interact with someone who feels like they are a Republican or they consider themselves a Republican, what is it like when they find out you've got that D next to your name? What are those conversations been like? True enough, man. I haven't had not one negative interaction in the year that I've been doing this. Every conversation I've had has been respectful. is led to people saying things like, know, I never voted for a Democrat before, but you might be the first one. So I've garnered a lot of support, whether it's independent Democrat or Republican. I attribute that to the way I carry myself. You know, I'm not out here trying to fight, you know, fight your culture war. There's plenty of people that do that for you online and y'all can go in those spaces and have at it. You know, I'm out here trying to actually have real solutions for everyone. Yeah. So yeah, I've never had a negative interaction with anyone. Everything has been truly positive. A lot of people are a lot more open to having these conversations as far as, you know, hearing me out, hearing what I'm trying to do. And again, a lot of stuff is literally just common sense and we can agree on a lot of different things. Now, I'm also not naive in the fact that again, I'm almost six feet tall and 230 pounds. So it's a little bit different. approaching me, as opposed to approaching, you know, just a standard politician and being a little bit more aggressive. people are. It definitely acts as a deterrent when you have to think twice about, no, maybe I need to speak a certain type of way because I don't know how this is going to go. So I'm not naive in that fact. But again, I have to use everything that I can to get the advantages out here. I need to have these conversations. Fair enough. It allows me to get into spaces that most normal people. ⁓ truly don't get into, know, we saw over the past election, you know, the whole, bro podcast, ⁓ network that, you know, infiltrated a lot of people that kind of persuaded them on which way to go. And those are spaces that I can get into, you know, obviously I'm in the gym a lot. So, and I'm in, you know, my career as a firefighter. So those spaces that normally most politicians don't even get to step into, I actually get not only, I'm not only allowed to step into it, but I get invited into those spaces because I'm seeing this. you know, quote unquote one of them. at the of the day, again, you know, I use those things to my advantage to be able to have real conversations with people. Yeah, that's awesome. ⁓ Obviously, for the last, you know, 80 years, the United States has ⁓ been the head of the table when it's come to not just the United States itself, but also the world, the world on the world stage. ⁓ This. administration has ⁓ summarily destroyed a lot of that, or is at least in the midst of destroying a lot of that, whether you're talking about the problem of tariffs around, you know, with everyone, Venezuela, Greenland, all of the stuff that's going on. Regardless of, we're not sure obviously where it's going to end by the time this administration is done, but our place at the table is going to change. How do you see America's ⁓ place on that world stage, our foreign policy moving forward from where you see us being right now. It's going to take a lot of mending fences when it's time ⁓ to ⁓ change over to hopefully a better future and a better administration for all of us. I truly believe it's going to take decades to repair some of these relationships because again, it's trust and a lot of trust has been broken from what I've seen across the world with a lot of different entities. And again, I know we You know, we talk about making sure that a lot of people here are taken care of first. We prioritize the people here as far as making sure we all have health care, make sure we can afford to live, making sure, you know, the environment is good, all those things. I 100 % agree with that. And also think that, again, we need to make sure we have good relationships with the people that are, especially our allies, because again, we all live on this one rock and we want to make sure that we can live as peacefully together as possible. So that is my... That's kind of how I look at things. You know, I work in a field where, you know, lot of times I don't like everybody that I work with. But at the end of the day, we all have a common goal and that's to preserve life and preserve property. And the goal is always first over how you feel about a certain person over your petty little differences over, you know, political affiliations, all those different things. And if we can come together for a common goal, there's no reason why us as an entire world can't come together for a common goal. How has The loss of health care subsidies and the big, beautiful bills, ⁓ cutting of things like Medicaid, how will that affect your specific community and district? You know, more, more people going to the emergency room because they don't have insurance anymore. So now you don't have that primary care physician. So now you're either going to go every time you get a little hiccup. instead of just calling your doctor, which is going to overwhelm and stress the system, which is already overwhelmed distress. I'm pretty sure you see the nurses in New York are about to strike. We have a nursing shortage here in Florida, so the system is already stretched in. And now you're going to potentially put more people into a system that doesn't necessarily need to be involved in it, because again, it's an emergency situation. A lot of times, you know what you might think of this emergency possibly could have been taken care of if you had health insurance with a primary care physician. Also, you're going to wait too long. lot of people, because they don't have insurance, maybe some little things that they will see their primary care position for, but they don't want to go to the emergency room. They let it fester until eventually it becomes too late and the problem becomes a problem that's irreversible. So it's either you're to have people flooding on the front end or on the back end to those emergency rooms. And then, you know, the potential loss of life due to this legislation, you know, ⁓ I've had an instance where we had a, ⁓ a person in my district who was a diabetic and he depended on, you know, he depends on insulin and that insulin cap once he got, once it was removed from $35 and the price is spiked, he can no longer afford insulin. So, a lot of times when people can't afford their insulin, what they do is they'll call us because we're actually allowed to, as paramedics and EMTs, we can give them the things that they need to bring their sugar down in order to help them regulate. Well, the more you stay in a hyperglycemic state, which is high blood sugar, it actually starts to affect your heart and eventually push your heart into a lethal arrhythmia. And that's pretty much what happened. He couldn't regulate his sugar anymore. And unfortunately that, that, um, that person was, is not with us anymore. And it wasn't like he was, you know, seventies or eighties, he's in his fifties. was a relatively younger dude still. And he stayed a whole life to live. And you know, he had a family, he had children. now you know, because of legislation, because of policy, he's no longer here to be here with his kids. So it's things like that, that I've seen, that I've experienced, that I hear about that legislation affects and the people that are signing these bills and writing this legislation, they don't see it because again, to them were just numbers on a paper and I don't get to look at it that way. You know, ⁓ I'm here on the ground with these people as they are dealing with these things. One of the other big things that I know everyone in Florida is dealing with is ⁓ high insurance rates. ⁓ Do you see any pathway to helping Floridians with that in Congress? It's funny. call credit to where it's due. I got this idea from the gubernatorial candidate here, David Jolly, who's running as a Democrat for Florida. He came up with a great idea that I think that's potentially beneficial, not only to everyone here in Florida, but possibly to everyone in this country. He wants to establish a state catastrophic fund. And what that would do is it would take the burden off the insurance companies to cover natural disasters. So any type of natural disaster, things of that nature, the state will actually cover instead of the insurance companies. And that would lower your insurance by almost 60 % because you're covering for those natural disasters. And with that fund, doesn't have to involve any increase in taxes because here in Florida, we have a lot of tourism revenue or, we did before all the craziness happened, but you can, you could use some of that tourism revenue towards that state catastrophic fund. And again, that would lower insurance for a lot of homeowners and people here. And then also would entice in more insurance companies to come back to Florida because now they're not worried about having to cover. ⁓ for these hurricanes that we have, because a lot of companies left because, know, at one point in time, it seemed like we was having a hurricane every year. And you know, the insurance company is all about profit. And once that profit starts to dip, you know, we got to start making some some changes. And so a lot of insurance companies left, which means we didn't have a lot of a lot of supply. So obviously, the prices start going up because it was so very few people willing to insure us as Floridian. So I think something like that catastrophic fund. would again, take the burden off the insurance companies and lower prices for us and also bring more insurance companies back to Florida. So that would be a tremendous help to us. Cause right now the way it's set up here in our state, the insurance companies are actually subsidized as opposed to, you know, us down here who actually need it. And think someone asked me, it's like, ⁓ so you want to trust natural design. You want to trust my home to the government here in Florida. And I'm like, well, you already trusted to an insurance company that denies you three times. I think you might have a better shot with the state of Florida as opposed to the insurance company who still has a blue tarp on your roof. So that's just my personal opinion. No, I think that's I think that's probably one of the biggest things that we ⁓ we as constituents, but even just we as Americans, as politicians need to do a better job at is not just. say yes, it can be done or no, it can't be done. But talk about the possibilities. Actually say, you know, what if we did something like this and then work through it? Because I feel like what happens is no one wants to try anything because they're worried it will fail. And so the only two options is it's like with the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act wasn't perfect. No one's saying the Affordable Care Act was perfect. But the only option that we seem to have now is either keep going with what we got or get rid of the whole thing, neither of which is going to be sustainable long-term. So anytime we can talk about other ways that we could potentially make things work, I think that's a great idea and something we need to do more of. So that's awesome. should just get over that, the government is going to be doing it. That's socialism. It's like, you know, I hate these words because people just throw out these buzzwords to fear monger. And it's like, we don't... We live in a hybrid society. There's capitalistic aspects to our society. There are socialistic aspects to our society, i.e. my career. Who do you think pays for the fire service? The fire service is a socialistic program. The taxes from everybody here in the county help pay for you guys to have fire service, police service, roads, public works, education. All these things come from... quote unquote, socialism. That's what I'm saying. It's like, stop with these buzzwords that are meant to drive fear. We already have programs. We already come together to put our tax dollars to good use in our communities. So why can't we put our tax dollars further use in other aspects? And the reason why is, again, you have these corporations, have these big companies, you have these mega donors that come in and don't want to lose their profits, don't want to have hits on their business. And we're stuck in the situations that we are in now. We could have a great single payer healthcare system, but because we have a healthcare industry and an insurance industry, they are quick to, again, throw out those buzzwords and those fear-mongering words to keep all of us from being able to have healthcare, unfortunately. So let's do a little quick future casting thing. You get through the primaries, get through November, whatever the actual election day is, November, you get through election, November 3rd. You win, January 2nd comes along, you get sworn in. What's the first thing you do? The first thing that I do. ⁓ my God, that's a good question. ⁓ The very first thing that I do when I get sworn in, I think ⁓ I'm going to get in trouble. That's the very first thing I'm going to do. I'm going up to everybody that I feel is not doing what they're supposed to be doing. I'm telling them about themselves 100%. They're not, they're not going to like me on my first day. ⁓ I'm going to figure out, you know, do my orientation, figure out how all things work as far as, ⁓ you know, proposing bills, all those technical things. But for real, I'm going up there be like, Hey, I just want to tell you guys from the bottom of my heart, expletive, expletive, expletive, expletive, expletive, expletive. All right, now let's get to work. Yeah, there you go. Hey, you know what? Sometimes there's a reason when I started this podcast, it was all about having those hard conversations and you know what's hard conversations require some expletives and there's no, there's no other way remember so much on this journey of how things work and how politics work and what our politicians are actually doing left, right, center, don't even matter. Like it's a reason why we feel as though our current set of leaders don't actually work for us. And when you get behind the scenes and you kind of figure out how stuff really works. it further angers you. I've never felt so disgusted by a system in my life. It's gonna take a major overhaul of people like myself and everyday working class citizens that get into these offices and actually wanna do the work for the people and not do the work for the donors that put money in my pockets. ⁓ So for everyone that's listened this far and watched this far, ⁓ what's one... or two things that you want to make sure that you would want to make sure that they come away with about you and your campaign. Number one, I'm not, I'm doing this for you guys. I'm doing this from my heart and doing this as a genuine public servant. want to make sure when I get in here that I'm working for the people that put me in office. This is a completely grassroots effort. There's no corporate PAC money in my campaign. There's no foreign interest money in my campaign. Every dollar that I've raised has come from just an everyday regular person that believes in my message and believes in what I'm trying to do. And I don't have any aspirations for power. I'm not a man that, you know, prioritizes money. live a very simple life. I'm happy watching Netflix and playing video games. So I am perfectly content with where I am in life. But there are too many people around me who are not, you know, who don't have that luxury ⁓ to be content, ⁓ unfortunately. So I want to get in there and actually do what I say, man. I want to get in there and be a representative of other people. If I feel as though my integrity has to be compromised in any form or fashion, or if I feel like I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, please, please vote me out. Again, I'm not trying to do this for a long time. I love my career as a firefighter. I love being on the truck. And if my punishment for not doing what I'm supposed to be doing is going back on the fire truck, I'd be all right. Yeah. ⁓ Bernard, where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or help ⁓ donate to your campaign? Absolutely. Go to bernardtaylorforcongress.org. You can go to bernardtaylorforcongress.org. You can sign up to be a volunteer for the campaign. You don't have to live in my district to be a volunteer. If you want to do things like phone bank, if you want to do things like social media blitzing, which is basically reposting and commenting and sharing all of my content, you could do that from anywhere in the country. If you want to cameras and knock doors, you do have to be in my district. I mean, unless you want to fly in for a day and fly out, you know, you got that for me. I appreciate it. But if you want to do any of those things, you go to my website and then obviously you can go to my website and donate as well. The link is right at the top of the page. Again, guys, every dollar helps these donations go to help and get my word getting the word about my campaign out there, whether it's mailers, emails, text messages, all that fun stuff. So the more money I raise, the more people I'm able to reach in my district, the better chance we have of winning this district. Yeah. Bernard, thanks for spending a little time with us, allowing us to get to know you. For everyone that has listened this far, thank you so much for listening. We both appreciate it. I guarantee. Please hit all those buttons down below. It helps me be able to keep doing what I'm doing, which is ⁓ here. If you don't know about Breaking the Meta, we're all about having hard conversations when it's necessary. breaking the status quo and making sure that all people, matter your race, religion, gender, or identity, get rights, respect, dignity, and safety. It's something I will continue to fight to do as long as I am doing this podcast. ⁓ And please like, watch, share, not just this video with Bernard, but all of the videos with all of these progressives that I'm sitting down with, they need visibility, they need name recognition, and they're not accepting PAC money. They're not accepting all the money from everywhere to throw it out there. not only if you can help give, also just sharing these videos anytime you see them out, whether it's their social media or this video right here. I know they would appreciate it as much as I would. So Bernard, again, thank you for being here and for everyone else, we'll see you next time on Breaking the Meta. Bye guys.