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Edited on Wed Sep-19-07 05:34 PM by haele
What your bud may be talking about is Tricare, rather than the VA. A lot of retirees confuse the two services. If your veteran friend is like me, a military retiree who is still under 65 and now working in the civilian sector, many of our employers are seeing are some changes in how Tricare can be handled during the benefits selection window.
My understanding from what has been put out by my company is this - Tricare availability access for employed retirees and other eligible service members is changing; used to be that some companies would "promote" Tricare for eligible employees, providing low cost supplementals to Tricare Basic and assisting with applications - again, for the employees that are already eligible for Tricare but may or may not be signed up. Now apparently companies aren't going to be allowed to provide Tricare basic and supplementals as a "benefit" selection, even though it saves the company to have the employee on Tricare than, say, Aetna or Blue Cross. You have to sign up for all Tricare benefits on your own through an authorized Tricare office.
Apparently, having to add the now active duty Reservists and National Guard members and dependents to Tricare for the length of their deployments is costing the DoD enough major money that they want to ignore otherwise eligible retirees & dependents from getting anything out of Tricare until the member cannot get some other form of "medical" benefit through their work and goes through the hoops to seek out the eligibility on their own.
Haele
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