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Legion, MOAA unhappy with 2013 budget

The nation’s largest veterans group and the biggest association for military officers wasted no time launching complaints about the 2013 defense budget unveiled on Monday.

The 2.4 million-member American Legion says the budget’s proposals to raise health care fees for retirees and create a commission to study ways to reduce military retirement costs break promises to current service members and send a bad message to future troops.

“By increasing, and in some cases quadrupling, health insurance fees for military retirees, you are sending a powerful message to those in uniform and to their families that their decades of service and sacrifice are unappreciated,” said Fang Wong, the the Legion’s national commander, of the Pentagon’s plans for higher Tricare fees for working-age retirees.

Wong also said the Pentagon proposal to create a Retirement Modernization Commission to recommend changes in retired pay could “encourage people to leave the military for a safer and less demanding career in the private sector.”

While Pentagon officials have promised that any potential changes in retired pay would not apply to current service members, Wong said that doesn’t make it a good idea for the military. “Grandfathering benefits cuts merely tells tomorrow’s veterans that their service isn’t as valuable as those who served before them,” Wong said.

The president of the Military Officers Association of America called the proposed Tricare fee increases a “breach of faith” and accused the Pentagon of using “bait and switch” tactics because modest increases were approved last year and were believed to be the final word on changes.

Norbert Ryan, president of the more than 370,000-member MOAA, said Congress ordered last year that future Tricare enrollment fees be capped at no more than the cost-of-living increase in military retired pay, but now the administration is proposing massive fee increases to be phased in over five years.

“Throughout a service career, military people have been told that their decades of service and sacrifice constitute the steep up-front premium that will earn them military health coverage in retirement. Now, after the fact, they’re proposing to change a service-based program to a need-based system that may be appropriate for welfare recipients, but is a gross insult to those who already have completed decades of service to their country,” Ryan said.

Ryan also opposes proposed increases in co-pays for prescription drugs, something that could raise the cost of a 30-day supply of a brand name drug to $34, up from the current $12.

“MOAA disagrees strongly with the stated purpose of these increases to ‘move closer to market rates.’ A military career is supposed to earn top-tier health coverage, not merely something on the order of the civilian median,” Ryan said. “How can we expect to induce top-quality people to accept the arduous conditions inherent in a service career if all they have to look forward to is the same kind of benefit they could earn as a civilian, without worrying about deploying every other year?”