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Editorial: How to save Tricare

The Pentagon’s health care costs have more than doubled since 2001 to $43 billion this year, almost 10 percent of the defense budget. At this pace, health care will cost $65 billion by 2015.

Congress was right to shoot down the Pentagon’s proposal to deal with this budget crunch by jacking up Tricare fees for retirees and their families by 200 percent to 400 percent. But lawmakers only punted. They failed to come up with a solution.

Tricare fees haven’t changed since the program was created in 1995, during which time American health care costs have risen by more than 50 percent.

One result: Military health care beneficiaries’ share of actual health care costs has declined from 27 percent in 1995 to 12 percent today.

This has made Tricare the nation’s best health care bargain. But it also has made it unsustainable.

The way to tackle this problem is in phases:

• First, implement marginal annual Tricare fee increases so that the problem does not get worse. Matching fee increases to the annual percentage increase in health care costs nationwide — 4.5 percent per year over the past decade — would cost the average family less than $30 a year.

• Second, scrub wasteful spending from the system.

• Then, gradually return beneficiaries’ share of costs to 1995 levels. By setting annual Tricare fee increases at 1 percentage point above health care inflation, this can be achieved in 15 years. The extra charge would amount to less than $3 per family in the first year.

By keeping increases small and reasonable over time, the benefit can be maintained for everyone.