I watched the President's news conference last night where he promoted a major revision of the Nation's health care system. Afterwards, I was somewhat confused. I suppose that's a result of me (us) having been afforded (overall) excellent health care while in the military, and now that I'm retired that trend has continued with TRICARE FOR LIFE, coupled with Medicare. It's the latter program that needs revision, not so much the former.
As I neared the age of 65, I received several telephone calls daily from companies trying to sell us supplemental health insurance. Before the person on the phone got too far along in their pitch, I broke in and said, "I'm retired military." That ended their sales pitch, and they typically said, "You are indeed fortunate to be retired military, sorry to bother you, and my best wishes in the future."
In sum, we who have served in uniform made numerous sacrifices during our time in the military: indirectly causing great hardships on our families as we moved them around usually every two years or so, getting shot at and sometimes hit during deployments to some God awful places, and accepting with little if any complaint lower pay than our contemporaries in civilian life. I used to say that given an accounting ledger sheet keeping track of the pluses and minuses of my total Army career, I'd never break even just by the fact of all the "minuses" accumulated as a result of my two Vietnam War combat tours. Many of you reading this probably have double that number of deployments today, so your ledger sheet would be much worse than mine on the minus side.
Regardless, as my wife and I have grown older and tend to rely more and more on a good health care system, we appreciate what we have in the way of TRICARE. It's certainly not perfect, but it's still pretty darn good compared to what others in the civilian world have.
