Now Hear This - April 2011

April 2011 Navy
By CAPT Tom McAtee

Rationale for military health care fee increase for working age retirees

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently defended his plan to increase by $5 a month the fee retired working-age military personnel pay for family health care coverage, after a member of Congress called it a “breach of trust.” Gates responded that it was Congress in 1995 that broke that trust when it approved a $460 annual fee for retiree TRICARE family coverage. “Once they [Congress] acknowledged a fee, the idea it was free for life was done away with,” Gates said. He also added that Congress never said 15 years ago that the fee would stay the same. Gates pointed out that “many of these beneficiaries are employed full time while receiving full pensions, often forgoing their employer’s health plan to remain with TRICARE.” The Obama administration proposal also calls for indexing the TRICARE fee from now on to future Medicare premium increases.

The numbers behind TRICARE fees

In the fiscal year 2012 budget submission, the Department of Defense announced plans to offset huge TRICARE medical program expenses by increasing the annual enrollment fees paid by working-age military retirees. The proposed new plan does not entail changes to TRICARE Standard or TRICARE for Life, and does not propose means–testing of fees. It does propose modest, gradual changes in TRICARE Prime enrollment fees, and would exempt military disability (Chapter 61) retirees and survivors from those changes. It also proposes changes to all beneficiaries’ pharmacy benefits. Bottom line, it calls for: 1. Raising the 2012 Prime enrollment fees by 13% - from $230 single/$460 family per year to $260/$520. 2. Indexing those fees in 2013 and beyond to a medical inflation index based on a measure of Medicare cost growth projected to rise at 6.2% per year. 3. Changing TRICARE pharmacy copays to $5 retail and no-cost home delivery for generic. Brand name, $12 retail and $9 home delivery; non-formulary, $25 retail and home delivery. Retail is a 30-day supply whereas home delivery is a 90 day supply. While the proposed increase will put the annual TRICARE fee for a family at $520 a year, the fee for a comparable health insurance program for federal workers averages $5,000 annually. TRICARE costs the Pentagon $3,584 per beneficiary.

DoD/VA virtual lifetime electronic records coming

The Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) now under development by the Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will provide active-duty service members and veterans with a seamless benefits system that includes links to burial and memorial systems. The electronic records will include exchange of burial and memorial information with VA’s current memorial affairs operations and its Burial Operational Support System, which the Department is in the process of modernizing, budget documents said. The system will help to determine automatically the eligibility of a veteran for burial benefits, support request for grave markers and provide digital mapping of all headstones and grave markers in the 131 national cemeteries that VA operates. VA requested a budget of $70 million for VLER. The Department’s 2012 budget documents said VLER will end up not as a new record system but as a means to pull reliable information from a number of existing Defense and VA systems “in the shortest possible time.” VA officials said the connectivity that VLER will provide “has never been accomplished before and will greatly improve access to electronic health, benefits and administrative information for authorized service partners within the federal government and, most importantly, with private sector partners nationwide.” VLER will use the Nationwide Health Information Network to exchange health care information with private health care providers such as Kaiser Permanente, as demonstrated in a pilot project in 2009. Officials said they plan to continue these pilots in 2011, using an additional ten private health care providers.

Wear/use of electronic devices while in uniform; wearing of flight suit; and more promulgated in NAVADMIN 025/11

The wear and use of electronic devices and wearing of flight suits are addressed in NAVADMIN.

Updated list of ships exposed to Agent Orange herbicide released by VA

In January, the VA updated its list of ships eligible for the presumption of Agent Orange herbicide exposure based on operations. To view the entire list, go to www.ausn.org and look under “ADVOCACY UPDATE.”