washingtonscene
Wisconsin Joins Interstate Compact
■ Wisconsin became the 31st state to join the In- terstate Compact on Edu- cational Opportunity for Military Children, agree- ing to reduce obstacles for children transferring due to military-ordered moves. Defense officials highlighted the role of MOAA’s Wisconsin Coun- cil of Chapters in winning this victory.
wise, it yields only nine months of early retirement credit, because one of its quar- ters will span the start of a new fiscal year. The solution in Latham’s bill is simple
and sensible — provide “roll-over” crediting of operational service between fiscal years for all accrued service of at least 90 days. MOAA and The Military Coalition strongly support H.R. 4947.
TRICARE Contract Award
Reversed HealthNet retains TRICARE North region.
D
oD announced May 12 the TRI- CARE contract for the North region has been reawarded to
HealthNet, reversing the Pentagon’s 2009 decision to award that contract to Aetna. HealthNet appealed the original award, and its protest was upheld by a GAO re- view, which found multiple errors in the contract decision process. HealthNet administers the current TRICARE North contract, and this deci- sion means they will continue to provide service to the 3 million TRICARE ben- eficiaries in the North region for several years to come. In the South region, DoD is reopening the bidding process to the original bidding firms. This comes after the GAO upheld a protest by Humana of the decision to award the South region contract to UnitedHealth Group. Humana administers the current TRICARE contract in the South region. A protest of the decision to award the
West region TRICARE contract to Tri- West still is under review. In the interim, the current TriWest and
Humana contracts have been extended through March 2011.
3 2 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R J U LY 2 0 1 0
No Sacrifice Too Great —
to Forget DoD health care cost comments off-base.
P
entagon leaders once again are ratcheting up their complaints about rising military health care
costs and asserting those costs inhibit funding for weapons system procurement. They’ve been beating the same drum for the past five or six years. To be fair, it’s not as if there were no
justification for fee increases. Anyone who thinks military health care fees should never go up is living in a dream world. There’s no way to argue servicemembers whose retired pay might double, triple, or even quadruple over the course of several decades never should have to pay a single dollar more for health care than they did the day they left service. But there are reasonable ways and un-
reasonable ways to approach that issue, and we haven’t seen any reasonable pro- posals from the Pentagon yet. What’s particularly troubling is the seeming insensitivity and lack of perspec- tive in the comments from the most senior defense leaders — military and civilian alike — the very people responsible for putting millions of servicemembers in harm’s way over the past decade. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and speculate some kind of fee adjustment might save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in health care costs. That’s a relative drop in the bucket com-
pared to the hundreds of billions of dollars that study after study (including many by the DoD inspector general) has document- ed are wasted by the Pentagon’s broken procurement and accounting practices.
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