Surgeons General Lay Out How Many Health Care Jobs Each Service May Lose in Merger

Capt. Joeseph Sarcone, Doctor of Optometry, demonstrates how to use the various equipment used in optometry with a technician at Naval Air Station II (NAS) Sigonella on May 13, 2019. Sarcone worked with many patients performing eye exams. (Katelyn Sprott/Air Force)

Military.com | By Dorothy Mills-Gregg

Published December 06, 2019

Lawmakers expressed concern Thursday after hearing how many military medical billets are slated for elimination next year as management of the services' hospitals and clinics transitions to the Defense Health Agency.

Members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel received an update on the Military Health System transition in a lively hearing Thursday. The hearing focused mostly on access to mental health care for troops and their families.

Surgeons general for each of the services told Congress that they are no longer filling vacant positions, pending a billet review by the DHA.

They broke down how many billets their own reviews last year determined were "excess." That included about 4,000 for the Air Force; 6,935 for the Army: and 5,386 for the Navy.

"Bottom line, last year, each of the military departments determined that their current medical force exceeded the operational requirements they needed," said Thomas McCaffery, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. "And each military department made a decision to look at a subset of their medical billets and repurpose them to look for other high priorities tied to the military department's needs and meeting national defense goals."

Subcommittee Chairwoman Rep. Jackie Speier, D-California, and ranking member Rep. Trent Kelly, R-Mississippi, were not pleased with the numbers. They expressed concern that there are already long wait times for doctors' appointments, pointing out how dangerous it could be to leave mental health care specialist positions unfilled.

"I just want you guys to know: That's a lot of billets that are going away," Kelly said. "So we shouldn't just be subtracting, we should be adding in some areas and saying, 'Hey, we can get rid of these folks, but we need more in this area.'"

-- Dorothy Mills-Gregg can be reached at dorothy.mills-gregg@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @DMillsGregg.

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Dorothy Mills-Gregg

Dorothy Mills-Gregg reports on all aspects relating to veterans and military health care. Before reporting for Military.com and becoming obsessed with the Defense Health Agency transition, she was a city government reporter for a daily newspaper in Bakersfield, California. She has worked as a freelancer around Sacramento covering a range of issues and briefly wrote bill analyses for the Assembly Speaker's office. She is an award-winning photographer with a degree specializing in politics and national security from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

Email: Dorothy.Mills-Gregg@Monster.com Read Full Bio

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