Military/Veteran Stuff

I got this in an email from MOAA. There's some good news in the President's budget:

Budget to Expand Concurrent Receipt

The blueprint released this week for President Obama's FY2010 budget is making headlines across the country for its $3.6 trillion size and sweeping health care and tax initiatives.

But let's talk about the budget provisions affecting members of the military and veterans community that you may not find in your local newspaper or TV coverage.

Concurrent Receipt. For the first time in history, the FY2010 budget includes an initiative to help ease the disability offset to military retired pay. According to the president's budget release, it would expand coverage to currently ineligible medically retired members who are highly disabled. No specifics are available yet, but that could mean authorizing concurrent receipt for medical retirees with less than 20 years and at least a 50% VA rating. We'll need the details to be sure, but any expansion is terrific news for the disabled retiree community.

Military Manpower Levels. The budget proposes a 15,000 increase for the Army and 8,000 for the Marine Corps. MOAA strongly supports these increases. We're concerned that some in Congress have talked about rolling them back in order to free more funding for weapons programs. These force increases are the only real way to ease deployment stresses on troops and families, and MOAA will ardently oppose any effort to backtrack on them.

Military Pay Raise. The budget proposes a 2.9% raise for active duty, Guard and Reserve troops. That's the same raise as the average American's, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index (ECI). MOAA is pushing for a 3.4% raise, to continue Congress's 9-year effort to restore full military pay comparability. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, military raises were capped below private sector pay growth, causing a 13.5% pay gap and significant retention problems by 1998-99. Every year since then, Congress has plussed up military raises by at least .5% per year above the ECI to progressively reduce the gap, which now stands at 2.9%. Full pay comparability is a fundamental underpinning of the all-volunteer force, and MOAA believes we shouldn't stop working to get back to it, especially given the terrible wartime stresses our military families have endured for most of this decade.

TRICARE Fees. The budget information made public so far is silent on this issue, and we take that as a positive sign. There's no healthcare-related budget reduction indicated for the defense budget in either the discretionary or mandatory spending categories, as there was in the last several budgets of the Bush Administration. We'll await the final budget details in April to be sure, but what we've seen so far leaves us cautiously optimistic.

VA Budget. The budget includes $55.9 billion for "discretionary" VA programs (mostly health care) - almost an 11% increase from FY2009. Including "mandatory" spending programs like VA disability compensation, survivor benefits, and the GI Bill, the total is about $113 billion. It includes funds for a gradual expansion of the number of "priority group 8" vets (nondisabled vets with incomes above certain locality-based thresholds) in the VA health system. The plan is to open care to about 500,000 more category 8 vets over the next four years. Among other things, the added funds would expand mental health care, promote electronic health records, and cover implementation of the new GI Bill benefits.

All in all, that's pretty good news.

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