Readers of Tom Philpott's Military Update column sound off.

Please advise us all if what we’ve been reading in an e-mail being passed among military retirees is true.  [The e-mail claims that TRICARE for Life, the military’s prized supplement to Medicare, is threatened by President Obama’s health reform effort and the Congressional Budget Office.]

Thanks for clearing this up.

ROBERT SANTOS
Freeport, Fla.

 

In a Military Update column written last December, I described a Congressional Budget Office report that presented options for the new administration and Congress to consider to control federal health care spending.  Among 115 cost-saving options in the report, I explained, some suggested raising fees on military retirees and veterans.  So far, neither the Obama administration nor the Congress has embraced any of these options.

In the current atmosphere of fear over health care reform, what a few retirees, critics of the administration, have done is pull language on the CBO options dealing with military retirees from the report and introduce them to e-mail readers with alarmist claims that have frightened elderly retirees.

For example, a confusing claim is made that: “We (retirees) would lose the Medicare for life benefit and would have to pay.  We would lose TRICARE as a total care package.  We would not be allowed to keep TRICARE so when Obama stands and says if you like what you have, you can keep it, he lies…(CBO) has already drafted proposed legislation that would basically reduce our TRICARE for Life benefits….”

Not true.  CBO doesn’t draft legislation; it only offers options with pros and cons for each.  Also, neither Obama nor any member of his cabinet, as far as I know, has proposed changes to the TRICARE for Life benefit.

That doesn’t mean they won’t do so.  Indeed, an advisory panel of health care experts, formed by Defense officials during the Bush administration, recommended a host of changes to curb military health costs, including by raising fees on working-age and elderly retirees.  But again, Obama hasn’t endorsed these recommendations or any other plan targeting military retirees.

Here’s a link to my initial column on the CBO report, www.military.com/features/0,15240,182097,00.html, and another link to the CBO report, “Budget Options, Volume 1: Health Care," www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9925 -- Tom Philpott 

 

New GI Bill Mismanaged

Despite public assurances by VA Secretary Eric Shinseki over past months that the VA would be ready to implement the Post-9/11 GI Bill, it seems Congress knew differently, according to Rep. Vic Snyder’s remarks as reported in Tom Philpot’s Military Update column last week.  This resulted in tens of thousands of veterans and eligible dependents enrolling in fall semesters across the country only to have to dig into their own pockets or take loans to stay afloat.

Why couldn’t the VA and Congress have told the public, and more importantly the beneficiaries, the truth to avoid this unnecessary pain?

The VA stated that they underestimated the time it would take to process the new claims and used historical data of Montgomery GI Bill claims processing time.  It is clear they did not conduct a simple dry run of the new claims process to truly understand the workflow involved.  This should have been easy.

As an active duty Air Force member with 21 years of service and a bachelor’s and master’s degrees under my belt I was pleased to hear I could now transfer my remaining benefits to my children.  I asked time and again of VA officials and my local Education Services Office (ESO) how this program would work so we’d be prepared for my oldest to start school in the fall of 2009.  In the months leading up to the kickoff date, I was told guidance would be forthcoming.  ESOs were ignorant because they had not received any instructions from the service or VA on how this would work.

I deployed in July ‘09 to Iraq and once I arrived I found, through my own research, there was a website designed to transfer the benefits after 1 Aug.  This request to transfer then needed to be approved by the Air Force.  It took roughly a month.  Once my son received his certificate of eligibility he had to file with the VA office at the college for the benefits.  He did so and we’re still waiting for it to process.

He and I have both called the VA repeatedly to ask for a status of the application, to no avail.  They can tell us nothing.  In the meantime he is quickly approaching the end of the fall semester, on an IOU to the school.  No tuition paid, no book stipend paid (he had to get an emergency loan from the school), no living expenses paid.  Nothing.

Recently the VA approved an emergency measure to front beneficiaries who had not received their funds up to $3,000 to get them by while their claim is being processed.  What was not publicly disclosed was this offer was not available to eligible dependents…only veterans (this is hidden in a short note at the bottom of the Advanced Payment Q&A http://www.gibill.va.gov/advpayqa.htm).

The school tells my son that if the payments aren’t made by the end of this semester he will not be allowed to register for next semester.  That leaves student loans as the only option available to us or he’ll have to drop out until his claim is processed.  Since GI Bill funds are only paid to the school if you’re enrolled, this leaves a big question mark as to whether he’ll even be covered for the previous term if forced to suspend his enrollment.

The bottom line is this: Information and expectation management has been atrocious, all along the way.  The VA and Congress have not been transparent or forward looking in this matter and the half measures emergency payments, to make up for the mismanagement, don’t go far enough to cover all of those affected.

DAVE KUNICK

Major, USAF
Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Iraq

 

Letters may be edited for clarity or length.  Write to Military Forum, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA  20120-1111, send e-mail to militaryforum@aol.com or visit www.militaryupdate.com