washingtonscene Legislative
Scorecard Coming • October’s “Washing- ton Scene” will feature a scorecard showing specific actions your U.S. senators and repre- sentative have taken (or not taken) to sup- port selected MOAA legislative priorities.
going negotiations on options to address the deficit and the debt ceiling. Little was discussed at the briefing that
hasn’t been addressed widely in the news media. Administration officials reiterated there are multiple options and fallback plans to prevent a federal debt default but declined to specify what those are. During the question-and-answer pe-
riod, Strobridge raised MOAA’s concerns that, while all of the various groups have understandable concerns about finding their constituents “alone under the bus,” one of the real risks is cobbling together a mass of major program cuts in a last- minute legislative package raises the like- lihood of “doing something dumb.” In particular, Strobridge highlighted
reports that significant changes in the military retirement and health care pack- age are among the options for Pentagon spending cuts. “One of the top priorities expressed
today was national security,” Strobridge said. “In the end, national security boils down to men and women in uniform. Ev- eryone in America empathizes with the sacrifices of troops and families over the last decade. We obviously don’t think those extraordinary sacrifices should be com- pounded by major new financial penalties. “But there’s a broader national security
issue here, and that’s the country’s ability to sustain a strong career force. We already know the military retirement cutbacks Con- gress passed in the 1980s had to be repealed later after they crashed retention. And those changes were much more modest than the ones reportedly on the table now. “That’s what we mean about the risk
of just viewing these issues as line items on a budget list and throwing them into a last-minute, must-pass legislative pack- age. Those ideas have been around a long time, and there are good reasons why they haven’t been pursued.”
38 MILITARY OFFICER SEPTEMBER 2011 As this article went to press, MOAA’s
grassroots campaign on this topic had gen- erated 85,000 messages to administration and congressional leaders.
Fanning Health
Care Flames Report predicts rising health care costs.
T
he CBO added to the health care debate with a new projection that Pentagon estimates of military
cost growth over the next five years likely are understated by $25 billion. On health care, the CBO noted DoD
drug costs grew by an average 2.2 percent a year from 2006 to 2010, versus the na- tional average of 1.2 percent. MOAA’s response: No kidding. Might
that have something to do with overstress- ing servicemembers and their families with repeated deployments for the past decade? Service leaders repeatedly have told
Congress of rising demands for counseling services and related medications among currently serving troops and their families, and the demand is outstripping capacity. Further, the need for those services doesn’t end when affected servicemembers retire. This cost growth isn’t a beneficiary imposition on DoD’s budget. It reflects a DoD obligation to provide needed care for those it sent into harm’s way. The CBO reports military personnel
costs over the next five years are projected to grow by $5 billion, procurement costs will grow by $36 billion, and operations and maintenance costs will grow by $26 billion. In that context, MOAA finds it some- what incongruous that defense leaders keep singling out personnel costs as “eat- ing us alive.”
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