February 16, 2012
By Col. Steve Strobridge, USAF-Ret.
The president’s FY 2013 budget
proposes “tiering” military health care fees based on retired pay levels, so
retired E-6s and below would pay one rate, E-7s to O-4s would pay higher rates,
and O-5s and above would pay the most.
The Pentagon offers this proposal
as if basing health care fees on retired-pay level is doing retirees a favor.
In fact, it’s an insidious attack
on the very nature of service-earned benefits.
They may use terms like “tiering”
all they want, but let’s call it what it really is: means-testing.
To start, let’s recognize this
proposal is uniquely discriminatory toward the military community.
No other federal health care
beneficiary pays income-based premiums. The president, the speaker of the house,
and the secretary of defense all pay the same health care premiums as the
lowest-grade federal civilian.
Means-testing health care fees also
is rare in the private sector.
Why? Because it’s a benefit that’s earned by service to an employer or, in
the military’s case, to the country.
What kinds of things are
means-tested? Welfare programs, social insurance programs, and other unearned
benefits that are provided as a government gift or “safety net” for those in
need of assistance.
I’m sorry, but military health care
benefits most emphatically are not a gift, and MOAA believes these proposals
represent inappropriate increases for all
grades, regardless of retired pay level.
Generations of servicemembers were
induced to serve a career by promises that their decades of arduous service and
sacrifice would earn them these
benefits. In other words, service and sacrifice constituted their (enormous)
prepaid premium.
The means-testing proposal throws
that out the window — and with it goes the very dignity of your service.
It turns the whole meaning of
service on its head. What you reap is no longer based on what you’ve earned,
but on what you need.
So the longer and more successfully
you serve, the less benefit you earn and deserve?
How does that compute?
Onceyou buy into establishing some kind of income threshold for
means-testing, who’s to say one threshold is more appropriate than another? The
next time the government needs money, it can simply reduce the threshold to
make you pay more.
If this means-testing plan goes
through, you’re deluding yourself if you’re thinking it will be limited to
health care fees.
There have been many past proposals
(which MOAA successfully fought) to means-test retired pay COLAs, for example.
In the 1990s, various plans offered
by legislators and others would have reduced COLAs or delayed them until age 60
for servicemembers whose incomes exceeded a certain level. One plan would have
limited COLAs for any military retiree with an income above the poverty level.
And it wouldn’t stop there. Many in
the past have proposed limiting VA disability benefits based on income.
And don’t think the logic trail ends
with basing means-testing on retired pay alone.
The 10th Quadrennial Review of
Military Compensation (QRMC) noted that retired pay often doesn’t correlate with
a retiree’s true income, because many enlisted retirees have high-paying jobs
or officers might be unable to work after retirement for disability, etcetera.
So the QRMC proposed basing fees on
adjusted gross income reported to the IRS, as is already the case with Medicare
Part B premiums.
Under that philosophy, your health care
benefits (and then why not your COLAs and VA compensation?) would be cut back not
only because you served your country long and successfully but also because your
spouse has a good job, because you’ve been a successful investor, because you
inherited money from a relative, or any number of other reasons.
So in the end,
what means-testing really means is, “You didn’t earn squat.”
I don’t care what grade you retired
at, that philosophy will put the blocks to you and yours.
If you don’t want that to happen,
send your legislators this MOAA-suggested
message.
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