The House Armed Services Committee has voted to raise drug co-payments for Tricare beneficiaries who have brand-name prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies or through the Tricare mail order program.
President Barack Obama’s high-profile signing of an executive order to protect Post-9/11 GI Bill users from predatory practices of for-profit schools is viewed by veterans’ service organizations as a big step, but only a first step, toward curbing abuses within the U.S. education industry.
The House armed services subcommittee on military personnel has refused to give the Obama administration new authority it sought to phase in higher Tricare fees on military retirees over the next four years and to peg future Tricare fee hikes to medical inflation nationwide.
Despite enormous stress on military families from repeated wartime deployments and long periods living apart, service marriages are showing a level of resilience that social scientists can’t yet explain.
Older retirees such as Air Force Master Sgt. Floyd Sears, 81, stand shoulder to shoulder with younger generations of retirees in opposing any of the higher fees being proposed for Tricare benefits.
Tricare beneficiaries across 21 western states won’t know for another three months whether TriWest Healthcare Alliance will continue to administer their health care benefit beyond March of next year.
What if the military gave every service member an expensive car as a reward for honorable service, but they could take delivery only at night and the headlights didn’t work? Many of those gift cars might end up damaged.
Defense officials have asked Congress to approve a new governance structure for the military health care system that, like higher Tricare fees, would help to curb what, for a decade, have been runaway medical costs, officials explained.
If Congress blocks Defense Department plans to raise Tricare fees for military retirees and beneficiary co-pays on drug prescriptions filled off base, the services will have to make even deeper cuts in force strength than now planned, the military’s top health official told lawmakers Tuesday.
The biggest knife for slicing Tricare costs off future defense budgets is not new and higher enrollment fees or deductibles proposed for retirees and their families who use one of the military’s health insurance options of Tricare Prime, Standard, Extra or, for the elderly, Tricare for Life.
Out-of-pocket health care costs for military retirees and for users of the Tricare retail pharmacy network will jump next October if Congress approves President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget request delivered Monday.
The Congressional Research Service has a message for those who suggest planned defense budget cuts and military compensation curbs will return America to the “hollow force” era of the 1970s.
Many military homeowners who saw their homes plummet in value in the financial crisis still can’t get relief from “underwater” mortgages that leave families owing more to loan servicers than their homes are worth.
Congress has known for a decade that the formula it set in 1997 for adjusting physician payments under Medicare – and by extension the fees paid to civilian doctors under Tricare, the military’s health insurance program – is seriously flawed and can’t be allowed to take effect.
The end of the Iraq War also appears to end a golden age of growth in military pay and benefits, which lasted at least a decade and corrected many perceived or long-standing faults in military compensation.
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