Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Veterans in Indiana have a lot to be thankful for. We receive state tax reductions and enjoy hiring preferences when we apply for state jobs. And no state in the U.S. has a city like Indianapolis, which is home to more monuments and acreage dedicated to veterans than any other state in the nation.
There are also federal programs that support veterans in the state like TRICARE – the low-cost federal healthcare program that insures veterans, active-duty military personnel, and our families. It’s a godsend for veterans who fight physical and mental battles due to years of service.
Unfortunately, a newly introduced bill in our state legislature, could seriously disrupt TRICARE for the nearly 400,000 veterans that call Indiana home.
Indiana lawmakers just announced Senate Bill 173, which would make it illegal for organizations managing pharmacy benefits to also own pharmacies in Indiana.
Passage of this bill would be devastating to Indiana’s veterans and many other Hoosiers, because many of these pharmacy benefit companies also mail order and specialty pharmacies that service veterans.
Halting TRICARE’s mail order system for veterans and forcing pharmacy closures would not only make access to medicine unnecessarily difficult; it would be deadly. When people have little to no access to their prescriptions, too many will simply give up and stop trying to fill them. That would cause serious physical and mental problems.
Hoosiers already live in poor health compared to citizens in most other states. Too many of us deal with obesity, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and other incurable ailments. If we stopped taking medicines to treat them, our symptoms would only get worse, leading us into the emergency room – or the morgue, whichever comes first.
The added stress of PTSD for many veterans only compounds the issue. PTSD haunts many of Indiana’s veterans with flashbacks that can be triggered any time of day by familiar noises, smells, or vague reminders of our time in Afghanistan and other theaters of war, where we were constantly either on edge or in life-threatening situations.
For many of us, there’s no escape from PTSD, not even through sleep. In fact, the nights are often worse. While most people sleep soundly, many veterans are continually haunted with nightmares that drench us in pools of sweat, leaving us in a constant fear of falling asleep.
Thanks to the miracle of medicine, many of us can control our high blood pressure, our obesity, and even our PTSD. But the medicine has to be accessible. And if legislators take away veterans’ access to these medications through SB 173, it’s almost like they’re personally ripping these meds out of our own hands and leaving us to suffer alone.
With every day our symptoms go untreated by medicine, veterans become increasingly taken over by poor health, anxiety, and depression.
Indiana is not the first state in the nation to introduce this type of anti-veteran legislation. That “honor” would go to Arkansas, which actually passed a similar bill last year. However, federal courts halted and nullified the law, partly because veterans would not have been able to get their medications delivered through the Federal TRICARE program – and partly because it was unconstitutional.
I really don’t understand why our state’s legislators would try to pass a bill knowing that it also causes health burdens on veterans, active-duty personnel, and their families – let alone trying to pass a law that would fly in the face of our Constitution.
We fought hard for our benefits, and we deserve better treatment from our legislators than this. Tax breaks and monuments are nothing compared to health. Our politicians should simply reject this illegal bill before it does serious damage to Indiana’s veterans and military families.
Bill H Cummings – US Naval Officer 1963-68, BA Brown University, MBA Columbia University, Founder Pathfinder Insurance Training 1978-2022, Board of Directors National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals (NABIP Indy) since 1995
JD Miniear BA Northwestern University ’82, former US House Rep IN-7 candidate, founder of Indiana Republican Assemblies 2012, founder Indiana Bicentennial Legacy Harry Hoosier Project 2016
