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<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Mike Benbow, Business Editor benbow@heraldnet.com   Published: Saturday, May 17, 2008 Lawmakers tackle pay gap, fees for benefits By Tom Philpott Active-duty and reserve component members can bank on a 3.9 percent pay raise next January as Congress continues to close a perceived military pay gap that a Pentagon pay study say no longer exists. The House Armed Services Committee earlier this week joined Senate colleagues in approving, for a 10th consecutive year, a military pay increase that will exceed private sector wage growth by a half of a percentage point. Both the House and Senate panels also agreed to block the Bush administration, for a third straight year, from raising medical fees for working-age retirees or pharmacy co-pays under Tricare's retail network. Both panels also have directed the Department of Defense to lower premiums paid by drilling reservists and their families who enroll in the Tricare Reserve Select program. Those premiums by law are to be set only high enough to cover program costs. The Government Accountability Office recently found that Defense officials had set them too high. Premiums could drop for member-only coverage from $81 a month down to about $47 and for member-and- family coverage from $253 monthly down to about $175. Another set of health care initiatives, approved so far only in House committee version of the fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, would add preventive health care incentives. Co-pays would be waived or rebates given, for example, to patients who get routine health screenings appropriate to their age and gender such as colorectal exams, mammograms, cervical screening, prostate exams, annual physicals or vaccinations. Only Tricare Prime patients receiving managed care through military treatment facilities now receive such services with no co-payments or cost-shares. The House bill also would waive costs for smoking cessation programs, and would establish a pilot program to pay a preventive health allowance of $1,000 to a family or $500 to a member, to beneficiaries who keep up on recommended health screens and maintain healthy lifestyles. Blocking the higher Tricare fees sought by President Bush required lawmakers to find $1.2 billion to plug a hole in the military health budget, the House committee reported. But $345 million of that money, to prevent a jump in drug co-payments, required offsets of direct spending on other programs. Under the House committee plan, $45 million of that would come out of the pockets of military retirees by denying them 1 percent of their next cost-of-living adjustment for one month. Rep. John McHugh of New York, the senior Republican on the personnel subcommittee, branded this part of the solution for sidelining Bush's drug co-payments a regrettable budget gimmick. McHugh vowed to find a more acceptable alternative to propose as the bill is debated on the House floor. Rep. Susan Davis, D-Calif., chairwoman of the personnel subcommittee, shrugged off McHugh's criticism, saying difficult choices had to be made. The committee succeeded in backing significant pay and benefits gains, she said, despite the $1.2 billion hole left by a Republican administration in the defense health budget and the funds needed to boost the next pay raise beyond 3.4 percent endorsed by the White House, thus whittling a perceived basic pay gap down to 2.9 percent. A review of military compensation recently found that a military pay gap no longer exists if hefty increases in tax-free housing allowances over the last decade are counted. But in an election year, with 150,000 U.S. troops still rotating through the unpopular Iraq war, lawmakers are choosing to ignore the findings. E-mail milupdate@aol.com.

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