Arkansas is the proud home of over 240,000 veterans who have served overseas and at home, fighting for our freedoms and sacrificing their lives to protect that freedom.
Being an Iraq veteran led me to my life's calling, which is to help and protect our treasured veterans once they get home. And it is also the reason I strongly oppose Senate Joint Resolution 8, a proposed constitutional amendment that places an arbitrary one-size-fits-all value on life.
With SJR8, legislators want to put a dollar value on non-economic "damages" like human suffering and pain, something I'm very familiar with because of the high number of veterans in long-term care facilities. If the amendment passes, their lives won't be worth very much to nursing home operators who would be able to create a line item in their budgets to cover abuse and neglect.
Our current system forces them to be accountable, and veterans and others with loved ones in these facilities should be greatly concerned about losing that protection. Currently, a jury of our peers gets to hear a case and make a determination based on the facts. SJR8 would take that power away in favor of politicians and special interests.
SJR8's proposal to put a value on life only helps those responsible for causing harm. Non-economic damage caps put a price tag on injuries, making them all equal regardless of their severity. It would be the equivalent of saying that all crimes should have the same punishment, be it stealing a pack of gum or murder, simply because the accounting would be easier and cheaper. In a world with SJR8, life-devastating injuries, from abuse to neglect, would simply be included in the operating budget with no incentive to take corrective action to fix the problems that are killing and endangering our veterans and others we love, such as parents and grandparents.
In Arkansas, the vast majority of our veterans who end up in long-term care facilities live in privately run homes, many of which are operated by large corporations. Far too often I've seen tragic cases of veterans being abused, neglected, treated unfairly, and dying excruciating deaths. The more I became involved in their plights, the more I came to know other victims.
What I learned was that every single case was different. Every individual veteran or elderly person in one of these homes brings a different vulnerability and a different experience, and juries need to have the freedom to hear the individual cases and make the decision on how to account for abuse and neglect.
This is about safety and accountability, plain and simple. Those who would harm our veterans and loved ones don't want the unpredictability that comes from a local jury made up of our neighbors hearing the gruesome details of a case and calling for an appropriate punishment. They want to know what the cost will be upfront so that they can make the call between improving their services or just taking the hit to the budget.
I'm not a lawyer, doctor or anything like that, but I know that's wrong. The veterans I serve deserve more than to be a line item in a corporate nursing home's ledger, and the same goes for my family.
As a veteran, I fought to protect the constitutional rights of Americans, and that's why I'm voicing my concern and vowing to fight to keep protecting them. The lawmakers pushing this bill appear to have sided with the lobbyists and special interests over Arkansas families, so it's up to us to make our voices heard.
My brothers and sisters in arms fought for our country because they know that living this life is not about every man for himself, and that sometimes we have to fight to protect one another. Passing SJR8 would guarantee that we no longer have that ability. Please call your legislators and tell them that you oppose this dangerous proposal, if not for veterans, for your loved ones, and if not for them, yourself. Because one day, it may be you or me lying in that nursing home bed. When that happens, I hope SJR8 hasn't turned us all into line items for abuse and neglect.
Colonel Mike Ross of North Little Rock, Chairman of the Board for the Veterans Villages of America, retired from the Arkansas Army National Guard in 2009 after 37 years of military service.
Editorial on 02/19/2017