This governing stuff is hard

Last week, I wrote that the Obama Administration had decided to hike the inpatient fee for TRICARE recipients who were working age and using civilian hospitals. Of course we heard that the Administration was dumbstruck by the Defense Department’s announcement and we heard promises that the Administration would not let it fly.

We waited. We waited. No news of the reversal – the Defense Department is an agency of the Executive Branch, so all it would take is the President telling them “no”, right? Still nothing.

Today, the House-Senate conference for the 2010 Defense Appropriation Bill took action since the White House didn’t seem too eager to do the right thing according to the Stars and Stripes;

The last decision made by House-Senate conferees negotiating final details on a fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill Tuesday was to insert language that will roll back an announced Oct. 1 increase in fees charged to TRICARE Standard beneficiaries for stays in civilian hospitals.

The surprise fee increases, which were reported here last week, gave lawmakers a chance to ride to the rescue and, in effect, put a cherry atop the $680.2 billion defense policy bill, at least for working-age military retirees and their families who would have seen a $110-a-day bump in hospital bills.

That was a fortuitous opportunity for the armed services committees because other pay and benefit initiatives in the bill are relatively modest compared to past years.

Fortuitous? Screwing around with peoples’ health and welfare is fortuitous? No, actually, it looks like they were screwing around on purpose so they could seem to be doing something for military retirees. It seems it’s difficult to keep Obama’s campaign promises;

Obama promised in his presidential campaign to extend concurrent receipt to all disabled military retirees. But White House budget officials were stunned to learn the cost — $45 billion over 10 years — and so lowered their first-term target to all Chapter 61 retirees, clearly an unpopular compromise.

House-Senate Conferees also rejected two familiar Senate-passed initiatives as unfunded. One would have ended a reduction in Survivor Benefit Plan payments to 54,000 widows who also draw Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The other provision tossed would have made 140,000 more reservists mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001, eligible for earlier reserve retirement. In 2007, Congress had lowered the age 60 start of reserve retired pay by three months for every 90 consecutive days that a Reserve or Guard members is called up for war or national emergency if they otherwise qualify for retirement. For lack of funds, Congress made the change applicable only for deployment time after Jan. 28, 2008. That restriction will remain.

So they didn’t end the reduction from our military retired pay to pay for our own disability, they didn’t end the reduction in widows’ benefits (that their husbands earned for them) and they didn’t fix eligibility for Reserve soldiers who served in the war against terror. But they did fix the thing they inflicted on service members last week. What kind of childish bullshit are they trying to pull on us?

I guess governing is harder than making campaign promises.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Congress sucks, Military issues, Veteran Health Care