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Old 07-30-2009, 01:03 PM
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Default B.O.H.I.C.A. For retirees

To: All Military Retirees: It's BOHICA time - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

This is a "Heads Up" on a battle we are facing now and down the road with the new Administration. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has already drafted proposed legislation that would basically reduce our TRICARE for Life benefits to a system whereby we pay deductibles and co-pays up to $6,301 the first year for you and your spouse, with future years being indexed to increase with inflation.

What can we do? The article below, obtained from an Air Force Association and written by BG Bob Clements, best describes what we can do. Please read it and check the links for CBO language and do what Bob says-Send this email to every Military Retiree you know and write and email your Congressman often. For those of you that might have voted for "Change", you should do it more than often!


TRICARE FOR LIFE'S FUTURE.... TRICARE For Life was instituted to correct the broken promise that military retirees would receive free healthcare coverage for life and it covers the Medicare co-pay. Now a heavy assault has begun on Veterans'/Retirees' benefits to pay for other programs our President promised during the campaign. And it is a high priority of his administration. The one item of most interest to Retired Military is in Article 189. If approved by Congress the first assault wave would hit in 2011 and would hit hard. It would initiate cost sharing to require retirees to pay the first $525 of medical cost and 50% of the next $4,725 for a first year cost of $2,888 per person. It would be indexed to increase with inflation. (Isn't this ironic: since it is government that is mostly responsible for or causes "inflation" we get penalized again by our 'lovely' government.


A reason given for this action (for PR effect) is "overuse" by Retirees. For those of you who are covered by TFL you will want to pay attention
(Below) to what BG Bob Clements has surfaced about the future of TFL. In any case, on page 189 of the Congressional Budget Office report, see the note below on how to get to that spot, there is a strong recommendation to eventually eliminate the program as it is too expensive. Just another move to slight those of us who dedicate much of our adult lives t o the defense of our country.


Strongly recommend that you contact your elected officials and register your strong opposition to the elimination of the TFL program.


Heads-up from BG Bob Clements, USAF Ret(P38 Bob)

The following has been added to the Congressional Budget Office Web Site www.cbo.gov/ a. Budget, Options, Volume 1: Health Care
(www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=9925) 1. click on PDF 2. do a search for TFL Now here it is folks and I will guarantee if you sit around on your behind and do nothing about it as they bring these 0Aoptions forward this coming year, you will lose one of the best healthcare benefits that the Medicare eligible retired military have. It is short of the promises made that we fought so hard for back in the late 90s and early 2000s but it is still the best healthcare program that anyone in the United States has, bar none.



People who are professionals always look for the channel of least resistance when it comes to cutting money out of the Federal and DOD budget. I can tell you this straight on, military retirees are one of those channels of least resistance noted for sitting around, doing nothing, and waiting for ole Joe to do it for them. You had better wake up. Your medical benefits are prime target. If you lose them, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Let me repeat that ... you have nobody to blame but yourself.



The way to secure your benefits is to write to your members of Congress and to keep writing and writing and writing. ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH!! Keep repeating the above statement until you are blue in the face. Now I'm going to make one more statement to all of you younger people out there who are not yet eligible for TRICARE for Life. HEALTH CARE WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME THE DOMINATING FACTOR IN YOUR LIFE. Remember that . . . . it will impact you big time with the utmost in cruelty unless you are fortunate enough to die from a heart attack or get run over by a truck.


The service organizations will put up a fight, but, they will need your help and can't do it by themselves. I hope this makes it clear as to what you can expect if you do nothing.


To show you how stupid these professionals can be at times just read the data on the noted sites closely. You will see that in spite of the MTFs (Military Treatment Facility) need to get patients back to keep their doctors busy and the hospitals from going to clinic status, these people from OMB would employ a means to keep retirees from using MTF facilities by charging them a fee for services. How dumb can you get. Even if you are an Obama fan, and believe that changeth cometh, TFL option from OMB will not go away. They need the money they spend on you for other programs for people who produce nothing but votes to keep their boss in office.


If you know of anyone who is Retired Military, please forward this on to them.


Remember- TFL is an "Earned Benefit" that's been granted by a previous Congress
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Old 07-30-2009, 03:08 PM
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I just remembered some long-winded blather several months ago about this military commission that was going around, plotting and schemeing how they were going to take away all our medical and disability benefits, blah, blah, blah. Well, it seems that this "commission" has been reincarnated, and worse than all the boogy-man horse hockey that was foretold about them, this time the real life bad guys are the Democrats and how they are planning to screw the retirees.

Compared to the current corrupt thug in the White House, even ol' Slick Willie is looking good.
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Old 07-31-2009, 08:16 AM
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Angry nothing new from this administration

Health Concerns

Claim: Statement reproduces President Obama's response regarding opposition to his veterans' health insurance plan.

MIXTURE

Example: [Collected via e-mail, April 2009]

I received this in an e-mail. Is this true, did Obama say this?


HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES

The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal. "Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute."

"I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country," Obama continued. "I wasn't asking for blood — just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."


Origins: This item is another entry difficult to classify as either "true" or "false." It's false in the literal sense that President Barack Obama did not utter the words attributed to him above; this piece is an excerpt from a form of satire that makes political or social points by putting outrageous words into the mouths of others.

However, if the same sentiments had been cast in the third person (rather than as a faux quote from President Obama), they couldn't be dismissed as completely false. They're an expression of the outrage many people felt about a very real issue, a plan the Obama
administration floated in March 2009 to save an estimated $540 million per year by requiring veterans with private medical insurance to use that insurance to cover the costs of treatment for combat injuries and other service-related health problems. (With a few exceptions, veterans are currently responsible only for health care costs incurred for reasons unrelated to their military service.) Among other issues, the proposal raised the prospect that injured or ill veterans might find it more difficult to obtain employment in the private sector if employer-funded private insurance had to pay for their health care.

The plan was heavily criticized by many veterans and veterans' groups, especially those who "believe that upon enlistment, the government pledged lifetime coverage for injuries sustained on the battlefield or elsewhere." And, as reported in the Boston Herald, it seemed to many observers that the Obama administration had been caught completely unaware that its proposal would meet with such vehement and outspoken opposition: However, many said that they were surprised by the ham-handedness of the private insurance effort because it seemed that no one in the White House or the [Veterans Administration] took into consideration how veterans would react — or Congress, where several members called the plan "dead on arrival."

"The president needs to drop this," [Paul] Rieckhoff [executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America] said of Obama. "The longer we wait, the more it hurts his relations with the [veterans service organizations] and with vets. This is a no-brainer. We were all shocked. We don't understand why he's picking this fight."
A Newsday editorial summed up many Americans' feelings about the matter in opining that: This load-shedding device would have saved the government about $540 million. But whoever proposed it to Obama was politically tone-deaf.

To Obama's credit, he appears to have backed away from this insensitive proposal. But veterans still can't figure out how he let someone in the administration persuade him to try it. Frankly, neither can we.
As we've noted many times before, satire that hits too close to its mark is often mistaken for real news. In this case, it appears that the Obama administration took such a large misstep that it left some people wondering whether the president might really have been callous enough to offer the response attributed to him above.

Last updated: 2 July 2009

The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/veteranshealth.asp
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