Mark Goldberg
has the scoop:
All full-time military personnel are eligible for the military's TRICARE health plan, as are reservists called up for active duty. After After reservists are deactivated, however, they generally lose their TRICARE coverage following a short, transitional grace period. Having the option to buy into the military's the military's TRICARE coverage would be attractive to many reservists and their families. as it offers comprehensive policies at very low cost.
In 2002, a General Accounting Office report found that as many as one-fifth of the nation's 1.2 million part-time soldiers lacked health insurance. This startled many lawmakers into action, and, in May 2003, Senators Tom Daschle and Lindsay Graham successfully pushed for an amendment to the Senate's version of the fiscal year 2004 Defense Authorization bill that would protect reservists from going uninsured by allowing them to buy into TRICARE when not on active duty.
Though the "Graham-Daschle amendment" had overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate, the administration sought to scuttle the proposal as it moved to the House. That June, in a letter to Representative Duncan Hunter, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the Senate's efforts to expand TRICARE a "troubling provision" because the ammendment amounted to an unfunded entitlement that would drain resources from other, presumably more important Department of Defense activities.
Our National Guardsmen are being asked to sacrifice their lives, jobs and families for Bush's War, yet allowing them to buy into the military's health insurance system is a "troubling provision".
May those assholes rot in hell.