Were you promised by your company that you’d get “free” healthcare for life if you’d risk your life? The military, especially the 20-40 year retirees were. Apples and oranges, FRiend. Wal-Mart, McDonalds and Apple don’t ask you to invade another country, take a hill, put out fires surrounded by jet fuel or go into villages surrounded by people who want to kill you. See the difference? Sears, Halliburton and the rest of the Fortune 1000 don’t promise to take care of you if you lose a limb or an eye in their service.
You’re right. It’s clear they want to discourage retirees from using this benefit that they earned and were promised. I know. I know. It wasn’t written into the enlistment contracts, but virtually every recruiter promised free health care for life.
As you wrote, the risks of a military career are simply not the same as for most other employees. It’s not only that military members are in combat or sent to combat zones. They are also subjected to a wide range of additional health issues from overseas travel to less than sanitary regions. That’s why many were given all sorts of inoculations, to include combat warfare drugs. It wasn’t an option. You did what you were ordered to do.
Finally, I note with some interest the progressive scheme of the Obama premium increases. They just can’t let someone get a bit more $ than someone else. So you work your butt off to rise as high as you can in the military, taking on all sorts of additional responsibility, only to have your premiums increased. You get the same Tricare coverage as the next G.I., but you get to pay more for it because you had the gall to make rank!
Before I retired in 1990, they had already reduced my "Free Healthcare for Life" by making it mandatory that I convert to Medicare when I reached age 65. (Never mind that I can't receive full Social Security retirement pay until I'm age 66). My wife retired from the Federal Government and she has kept her Blue Cross/Blue Shield @ about $400 per month...which also required us to subscribe to Medicare at age 65. Our Medicare premium is $140 per month apiece.
Our bottom line is that at age 65 we now pay almost $700 per month for less coverage than we had before we had to subscribe to Medicare as it has been recently adjusted by Obama.
I personally would like to have the option to not be required to take Medicare, but I don't have that choice the way the law is currently written.
SKCM(SS) USN Retired