washingtonscene COLA Fizzling
■ Inflation dropped 0.1 percent in June. Unless that trend is reversed significantly in the next three months, prospects are dimming for any re- tiree COLA in 2011.
Strobridge challenged proposals to
make military retirement more like civilian programs, asserting the military requires a unique system to offset the extraordinary demands and sacrifices inherent in a service career. He reminded commissioners a 1986 law that reduced lifetime military retired pay value by 25 percent for new entrants had to be repealed in 2000 because it was undermining career retention. Strobridge said proposals to charge
military beneficiaries a fixed percentage of DoD health care costs ignore that “the mili- tary health care system is built to support military readiness, not cost efficiency, with three separate military health care systems and multiple contractors that compete for funds and don’t work together very well.” When the military goes to war, deploy-
ment of military doctors forces many pa- tients into more expensive civilian care. For these reasons and more, “beneficiaries should not be assessed any share of the cost for DoD wartime/readiness decisions or management inefficiencies,” he added. Finally, he cautioned against reducing
annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to military and federal annuity programs. “Regular COLAs are fundamental to
sustaining real purchasing power,” he said. “Curtailing them dooms beneficiaries to long-term, geometrically progressive deval- uation of their hard-earned compensation.”
Veterans in All
But Name Guard and Reserve retirees seek veteran status.
A
t a July 1 House Veterans’ Af- fairs Subcommittee hearing, Chair John Hall (D-N.Y.) and
Ranking Member Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) endorsed Rep. Tim Walz’s (D-Minn.) bill (H.R. 3787) to accord veteran status to
3 4 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R S E P T EMB E R 2 0 1 0
Guard and Reserve retirees who were never called to active federal service dur- ing their military careers. Although entitled to military retired
pay, TRICARE (at age 60), and a number of veterans’ benefits, career reservists are not veterans under the law unless they have been activated under federal orders. Walz is the highest-ranking enlisted re-
tiree to serve in Congress. He attained the rank of command sergeant major during his National Guard career and was deployed. MOAA, the VFW, and other partners in
The Military Coalition offered testimony at the hearing strongly supporting the bill. A VA government witness testified that an amended version of the bill would not qualify the reserve-retiree cohort for any unearned veterans’ benefits. But the witness fretted that the government still objects to the bill because it would change the concept that only federal active duty should count for veteran status. As more and more members of the
Guard and Reserve prepare for call-ups and continue to perform homeland defense missions in nonfederal status — securing ground zero in Manhattan and at the Penta- gon Sept. 11, 2001, conducting counter-drug and border-security missions, responding to Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, and preparing forces for deployment — MOAA maintains all who served a full Guard or Re- serve career should be declared veterans of our nation’s armed forces. The Disability Assistance and Memo-
rial Affairs panel also took testimony on other legislation that would: ■ protect veteran pension payments from being offset by private insurance settle- ments related to accidents, theft, other losses, and medical expenses from such causes (HR 4541); ■ increase aid and attendance rates for severely injured veterans, qualify severe- ly burned veterans for adaptive housing and auto grants, expand aid and atten- dance for veterans with traumatic brain
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