{"id":35062,"date":"2013-04-12T07:35:38","date_gmt":"2013-04-12T11:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=35062"},"modified":"2013-04-12T07:35:38","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T11:35:38","slug":"congress-mistrusts-obamas-defense-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=35062","title":{"rendered":"Congress mistrusts Obama’s defense budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Times<\/a> reports that members of Congress are raising many of the same points we discussed yesterday. Connecticut Democrat, Rep. Joe Courtney questioned the reasoning for another round of base realignment when the last one in 2005 hasn’t produced any savings;<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone who has spent seven years on the readiness subcommittee dealing with the 2005 budget BRAC which is not going to generate a penny of net savings for 13 years no prior BRAC has been able to do that in less than six years,\u201d Mr. Courtney said. \u201cFor a lot of us who\u2019ve spent a lot of time on this issue, that just doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

South Carolina’s Joe Wilson asks Defense Department officials about the justification for raising Tricare costs for veterans;<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd my concern is that we know this is a great program, Tricare. People are very satisfied. Military families appreciate this benefit. Commitments have been made to our veterans and to military families. Why would we be increasing the fees when, in fact, the program is working well?\u201d Mr. Wilson said.<\/p>\n

[Defense Undersecretary Robert] Hale replied that increasing enrollment fees would save about $1 billion. \u201cIf we don\u2019t do that, we will have to take that money out of readiness or modernization,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, Mr. Hale, you people already took $770 million dollars out of our surplus for Tricare, and now you’re back with your hand out for another billion bucks. If a private company had done that – take money meant for a healthcare program and used for operations with absolutely no intention whatsoever to replace those raided funds – the government would be coming down on them like a ton of bricks. Don’t veterans deserve the same considerations that the average worker on the street get?<\/p>\n

I don’t hear anyone talking about raising out-of-pocket costs for Medicaid to offset spending costs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Washington Times reports that members of Congress are raising many of the same points we … Congress mistrusts Obama’s defense budget<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues","category-veteran-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}