washingtonscene
TRICARE beneficiaries would be subject to penalties imposed on those who don’t obtain coverage. The House unanimously approved a
companion bill (H.R. 4887) in March, and the president signed the legislation April 26. The White House and the Pentagon
said all along there was no way military people would be subject to such penal- ties, but now the law lays that out. The Senate also passed a separate bill
explicitly protecting all beneficiaries of VA health care (S. 3162). At press time, the bill was awaiting consideration in the House.
Who Funds
These Studies?
Limiting family benefits sends the wrong message.
A
s stress on the force rises,
researchers are spending more time trying to figure out what
makes military families tick. A recent study, “Marriage and the Military: Evi- dence That Those Who Serve Marry Ear- lier and Divorce Earlier,” put out under the auspices of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (a nonprofit academic group), offers a case in point. It wasn’t the title that caught our eye, though that’s interesting enough. It was two other things. First was the study’s hypothesis that military “compensation policies induce earlier marriage by active duty service- members compared to otherwise similar civilians who have not served.” Second was the study’s conclusion that the military should consider phasing in family benefits to provide relatively few benefits at first and more as length of ser- vice increases (shades of “if the military wanted you to have a wife, they’d have is- sued you one”).
3 0 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R J U N E 2 0 1 0
Let’s get a few things straight. Do military people get married earlier than nonmilitary people? We’re willing to accept that if the data say so. Do married veterans get divorced more than married nonveterans, as the study asserts? We’d probably buy that, too. But claiming causation is something
else. There’s a correlation between the sun coming up and a rooster crowing, but that doesn’t mean the rooster’s crow made the sun rise. A number of circumstances might ex-
plain the trends identified in this study. It might be the military recruits more mature people through its screening process, and more mature people marry earlier. It might be military service and its attendant stresses and relatively big responsibilities put on young people exert a maturing process; or perhaps the mobile, stressful military lifestyle leads some to seek stability in their private lives through marriage. The study dismisses the stressful
lifestyle issue, noting the military di- vorce rate actually declines for families experiencing more deployments (while also noting a higher divorce rate among people who served than among those who didn’t). MOAA would interpret this data differently — that deployment and other stresses might break many marriages early, while those marriages that survive a couple of deployments are inherently stronger. We’re not trying to pass these ideas off
as facts, but they seem less speculative than asserting the military compensation system causes people to marry earlier and then divorce more. Sure, it could have that effect for some
people. But should it be a broad-brush conclusion? No way. There are an infinite number of reasons why people get mar- ried and an infinite number of factors that differentiate military people’s lives and circumstances from those of civilians, so
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