Pentagon's proposed approach to TRICARE for retirees.

 I was a mid-grade Captain when it just struck me like a ton of bricks what a quintessentially socialist system the military is.  From soup to nuts.  With two key things that made it work, more or less.  One, it was, generally, and certainly for the career crowd, a personal choice to stay in.  Yes, draftees are an outlier of sort... except when you look at the sometimes rather compulsory aspects of socialism.

Two, it was dependent upon (and worked because) of all the inputs from outside the system; i.e., taxes on a whole lot of people who were *not* part of the system.  

But at least you could opt-out periodically.

Now comes the Pentagon's budget proposal which includes fee increases (which, since we long ago lost the fight in the Supreme Court on free health care) I can live with, in that costs have skyrocketed, and we haven't seen a fee increase in 12 years.   

But what I don't like is the "tiering" - mating different fees to different retired pay.  Talk about nose under the tent...

The medical care piece is an "earned* benefit.  Not an entitlement, like Medicare.  Ideas like this have been floated before - pegging COLAs to retired pay, proposals that if you made a lot of money elsewhere, your retired pay would have *zero* COLAs, until your income dropped sufficiently, and then there would be no catch up, you'd just start getting COLAs.  None of those flew, thankfully - but they, along with this TRICARE scheme, represent a change in how the government is choosing to view military retirement - and not just for new entrants, but for people who paid their bills in blood, sweat and tears long ago.  

Not as an earned benefit, contractually agreed to, and the terms of which I have already complied with - but... as welfare, and subject to all the tinkerings and tweaks thereunto appertaining.  Only I can't get my part back.  Or, for some of us... actual parts.  

No, I'm not above waving the bloody shirt on this issue - it's the core of the government's obligation.

The TRICARE tiers...  I have a good friend who is a retired NCO.  He makes over 250K a year, in addition to his retired pay.  His retired pay is less than mine.  And I make a *lot* less than he does.  But his TRICARE fee will be significantly less than mine.  I don't grudge him his success - but he's a good example of the topsy-turvy logic here.  The fix for that, of course, would be to tie it to Adjusted Gross Income, but in fact I object to that even more.  Because you just reinforce the entitlement view, vice the earned benefit view.

And while I understand that, for example, federal civilian employees are paying more for their health insurance, they all get the same benefit for the same cost based on their cafeteria selections.  But not us.  Some of us will have to pay more than others - actually paying a fee for serving longer, or taking on more responsibility, both things we're generally encouraged to do.

Of course, the money crunch generates a lot of this kind of thinking - such as the thought to turn over the commissaries to AAFES, and shift that money to pay for some VA programs.  So, in this instance, rather than spread the burden on the population at large, we propose to essentially shift a cost (because AAFES will *not* be a cheaper alternative) to the active duty and retiree population to support the greater veteran population (many of whom aren't authorized the commissary benefit).  In the case of the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs (which are funded by AAFES profits and user fees) I understand that funding that by essentially making the users pay for what are nice to have programs (and taking away the ability of senior people diverting funds to other purposes, which happened when MWR came out of appropriated funding).  But tossing the commissaries to AAFES as a bill-payer to fund VA programs cuts a lot closer to the heart of the compact between the military and our overseers.

I understand the crunch.  I understand we aren't going to be shielded from the fiscal realities here.  But I do want to kick this camel in the nose.  And get it out of the tent.