I get more than a little impatient with two questions MOAA hears regularly from those who think military retirees should pay more for their TRICARE coverage.

Question 1: TRICARE premiums for retirees under age 65 haven’t changed since 1995.

Surely you can’t complain about doing some kind of “catch-up” increase after all that time?

There’s plenty to complain about. DoD’s proposal is way out of line with any kind of reasonable adjustment. Military retired pay has increased 31 percent since 1995; federal civilian health insurance premiums have risen 141 percent in the same period. The Pentagon is proposing to increase officer health care fees by as much as 270 percent.

Pentagon leaders who push “catch-up” TRICARE fee increases have conveniently one-sided memories. They want to overlook that military people who retired between 1984 and 2005 (pretty much the entire retiree population under age 65) already gave up huge chunks of their hard-earned retired pay because the government capped military raises well below private-sector pay growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Servicemembers who retired under the depressed pay tables during that 22-year period lost an average of 10 percent of their earned retired pay every year for the rest of their lives. An O-5 with 20 years of service who retired in 1993 is giving up more than $4,000 in this year's retired pay — and that amount will grow each year for life.

Nobody ever said, "Let's catch up retired pay for those two decades of caps," but Pentagon leaders want to complain that retirees haven’t had any increase in their $230/$460 TRICARE Prime enrollment fee for 10 years. In my book, that's talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Question 2: Civilians pay far bigger health care premiums, and their premium increases regularly exceed their retired pay raises. Why should military retirees have such a great deal?

My comeback (which is usually answered with silence): “If military retirees have such a great deal, why haven’t you signed up for a military career, or why aren't you advising your children to? I suspect it's because you understand that military people who spend 20 or 30 years in uniform have to pay some pretty hefty premiums of sacrifice — and you’ve concluded the benefit isn’t worth that kind of premium.”

Real compensation value amounts to benefit value divided by the amount of work, sacrifice, and money you have to expend to earn it.

Don't tell me you want to compare just the numerator of that equation without also comparing the denominator — the whole denominator, not just the money part.

Col. Steve Strobridge, USAF-Ret., director of MOAA government relations