Key senator says vets likely to get lifetime health care

Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va. said last week he is "optimistic" that before adjourning, Congress will enact a defense authorization bill that for the first time will, over Pentagon objections, give veterans military healthcare coverage for life.

Under the Warner proposal being discussed in a House-Senate conference of the "Big Four"-the chairmen and ranking members of the armed services committees-veterans would receive Tricare military health coverage as a backup to Medicare once they reached age 65, rather than having to rely on Medicare alone, as is the current policy.

The added Tricare coverage, projected to cost about $4 billion a year, would be available for FY2002-2004, Warner said. To make the benefit permanent within the FY2001 defense authorization bill would make the measure vulnerable to a point of order, on the grounds that it would break the agreed-upon budget ceilings, he reasoned. Veterans' groups have been lobbying hard to make the Tricare coverage permanent within the pending defense authorization bills.

Nonetheless, Pentagon and congressional budget analysts are worried. "It's the camel's nose under the tent," protested one analyst, reacting to three years of coverage. He said the new benefit would never be rolled back, cost the taxpayers billions of extra dollars and distort future defense budgets.

In what the Pentagon called his "heartburn letter," Defense Secretary Cohen recently told Warner that the healthcare provisions needed "more work" before they could be enacted. "I urge the Congress to proceed with caution and refrain from mandating new, unfunded benefits," Cohen wrote.

With both presidential candidates pledging to take better care of military people, it is highly unlikely President Clinton would veto a bill containing the new veterans' benefits. Another benefit championed by Republican leaders and likely to emerge in the final defense bill would pay the cost of drugs prescribed to veterans, a benefit the presidential candidates are promising to add to Medicare.

Warner said the Big Four are trying to agree on a compromise defense authorization bill without calling a formal conference meeting. If they succeed, the compromise bill would be submitted to the House and Senate for final approval in the near future. Complicating work on the bill is the addition of non-defense legislation, such as the hate crime bill, which Republican leaders have vowed to strip from the measure.

"I've got the biggest Christmas tree in Washington," said Warner of his authorization bill, because of all the legislative ornaments hung on it.