February 05, 2010
Three Weeks Until 21% Medicare/TRICARE Cut Last week’s report that H.J. Res. 45 (passed by the Senate last week and the House this week) would fix the 21% cut in Medicare and TRICARE payments to doctors (now scheduled for March 1, 2010) proved premature.
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| DoD Budget on Pay Raise, Concurrent Receipt, TRICARE Fees The $708 billion FY2011 defense budget proposes concurrent receipt progress and no TRICARE fee hikes, but the smallest military pay raise in almost 50 years. |
| Pentagon Settles PTSD Lawsuit The Defense Department has agreed to award military retirement status – including retroactive retired pay and TRICARE coverage -- to thousands of servicemembers who had been separated for PTSD during the past 8 years. |
Three Weeks Until 21% Medicare/TRICARE Cut
Last week’s report that H.J. Res. 45 (passed by the Senate last week and the House this week) would fix the 21% cut in Medicare and TRICARE payments to doctors (now scheduled for March 1, 2010) proved premature.
While it would let Congress reverse that huge cut without requiring specific cost offsets, separate legislation is still needed to make the fix. And only three weeks remain before the cuts kick in.
So it’s more important than ever to
(again) urge your legislators to act immediately to stop the 21% cut, and keep thousands more doctors from dropping military and Medicare patients.
DoD Budget on Pay Raise, Concurrent Receipt, TRICARE Fees
The Pentagon rolled out its FY2011 defense budget this week, proposing a $549 billion base budget (a 3.4% increase over 2010) and $159 billion more to support war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
During testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committee this week, Secretary of Defense Gates outlined three major priorities in the DoD base budget:
- Strengthening the nation’s commitment to the all-volunteer force
- Rebalancing America’s defense posture to prevail in current conflicts
- Continuing DoD’s commitment to reform, especially in acquisition
Highlights of initiatives proposed in the new budget include:
Pay Raise – A military pay increase of only 1.4%. This would match private sector pay growth between 2008 and 2009. But it would be the lowest military raise since 1963. If enacted, it would be the first year since 1999 without at least some progress in reducing a basic pay raise gap that still stands at 2.4%.
Concurrent Receipt - The budget again proposes a five-year plan to phase out the disability offset to military retired pay for all members whose service-caused conditions forced them into medical retirement. Congress failed to enact a similar proposal last year after being unable to identify cost offsets.
Family Support – The budget provides $8.8 billion – an increase of $450 million from last year – to emphasize the importance of child support and youth programs, spouse employment, commissaries, and schools.
Health Care –The budget proposes $50.7 billion to fully fund the Defense Health Program without any TRICARE fee increases for retirees.
When asked about rising health costs, Secretary Gates made it clear he thinks retiree fees should rise. “There has not been an increase in the premium for TRICARE since the program was founded in 1995,” he said. “I ask anybody to point me to a health insurance program that has not had a premium increase in 15 years…We absolutely want to take care of our men and women in uniform and our retirees, but at some point, there has to be some reasonable tradeoff between reasonable cost increases or premium increases or co-pays or something and the cost of the program.”
Gates said that when DoD previously proposed fee hikes and cut the budget to reflect that, Congress refused to make the increases, so the funding shortfall had to be made up. Rather than facing that scenario again, DoD has proposed full program funding, and looks to Congress for any action on TRICARE fees.
Pentagon Settles PTSD Lawsuit
The Government, in order to stay a final ruling, negotiated a deal in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims – the result will provide disability retired pay and family TRICARE coverage, at least temporarily, for thousands of veterans previously separated from service after suffering PTSD.
The arrangement stems from a class action lawsuit brought by the National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP). The NVLSP, representing seven veterans, claimed that the veterans’ Military Service Physical Evaluation Board (PEB) violated their legal rights, by assigning a disability rating for PTSD below the minimum 50% as required by the Veterans Administration Schedule of Rating Disabilities (VASRD).
The seven veterans have asked the Court to order the military services to give them all of the military retirement benefits to which a veteran with at least a 50% PTSD rating would be entitled.
According to the NVLSP, the federal court has allowed the lawsuit to be a class action suit on behalf of the following individuals:
All individuals who (a) served on active duty in the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, or Air Force; (b) were found by a Physical Evaluation Board to be unfit for continued service due, at least in part, to the individual's PTSD; (c) were assigned a disability rating for PTSD of less than 50%; and, as a result, (d) were released, separated, retired, or discharged from active duty after December 17, 2002, and prior to October 14, 2008 (regardless whether such release, separation, retirement, or discharge resulted in the individual's placement on the Temporary Disability Retirement List).
There are over 4,300 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with PTSD who could potentially be eligible for increased benefits. NVLSP is in the process of mailing to these veterans “opt-in” forms.
For those who "opt-in" to the class action suit, the military services agreed to prioritize applications to the records corrections boards requesting an increase of their PTSD ratings. In most cases, any such correction will be effective retroactively to the date of the action taken on the report of the Military Service PEB.
Veterans who choose to opt-in have until July 24, 2010 to return their form by either fax or postmark. The lawyers involved with the lawsuit have agreed not to charge any service fees to veterans who agree to join the lawsuit.
Veterans who feel they may be eligible and have not received a notice can find more information at www.ptsdlawsuit.com.
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