{"id":39357,"date":"2014-01-17T16:50:29","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T21:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=39357"},"modified":"2014-01-17T16:50:29","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T21:50:29","slug":"cbo-seeks-cost-sharing-with-retirees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39357","title":{"rendered":"CBO seeks “cost sharing” with retirees"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I was at the VA hospital in Martinsburg today picking up my wheelchair, so I’m sorry that I’m behind in catching up on my email and posting. But, speaking of veteran care, David sends us a link to Reuters<\/a> which reports that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is driving hard for Tricare hoop;<\/p>\n

The most effective way to control the rising expense of the military healthcare system is to boost cost-sharing among retirees, the Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday, endorsing an unpopular step Congress has repeatedly rejected.<\/p>\n

The non-partisan CBO said the Defense Department spent some $52 billion in 2012 for its TRICARE healthcare program, which covers about 1.8 million troops and their 2.6 million family members, plus 5.2 million military retirees and their families.<\/p>\n

That’s nearly 10 percent of the Pentagon’s $530 billion budget base budget for 2012 and about $5,400 per person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course “cost sharing” means gouging veterans’ pockets. But even if they cut out healthcare entirely from the Defense Department’s spending, that’s only 10% of their budget. Are you telling me that scraping the bottom of my wallet is going to help them get spending under control? Like I’ve said countles times, we had a $770 million surplus last year from our “cost sharing” Tricare costs and DoD raided the fund to have a bagel station in Chuck Hagel’s office. Or something. If there was $3\/4 billion surplus, it seems to me that we’re doing our “cost sharing” sufficiently.<\/p>\n

The CBO looked at three ways for increasing cost-sharing for retirees, many of whom leave the military after 20 years of service and begin receiving benefits while they are still in their working years between the ages of 40 and 65.<\/p>\n

The options looked at increasing fees or limiting service to so-called working-age retirees, as well as modest fees for retirees over age 65.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, we know that “modest” is a subjective term and usually doesn’t mean the same thing to the CBO that it means to a retiree over 65 years old. And, um, just because a military retiree is working age, that doesn’t mean he’s actually working. Sometimes not by choice, either. That seems to me to be an arbitrary yard stick to measure the solution. <\/p>\n

I’m going out on a disability retirement and I’m several years from 65, are they going to factor that in? I don’t think they know what they’re doing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was at the VA hospital in Martinsburg today picking up my wheelchair, so I’m … CBO seeks “cost sharing” with retirees<\/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":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veteran-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39357","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=39357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}