The Department of Defense is proposing to make military retirees pay as much as $2,000 more each year for health care and pharmacy coverage. Defense leaders want disproportionate fee hikes to help pay for weapons systems, and make military benefits track more closely to civilian plans.

Military retirees already paid higher premiums than any civilian – and paid them up-front, through decades of service and sacrifice. Military health and retirement benefits must be the best to help offset arduous military service conditions. Cutting benefits will only hurt long-term retention and readiness.

The world’s largest military and economic superpower can afford to pay for both weapons and military health care.

You’ve no doubt heard the one about how anything based on a lie cannot long succeed? If military recruiters are, in fact, lying to their prospective recruits, especially when it comes to health care, etc., it won’t be all that long before guys and gals figure it out and say, “To hell with that, Department of Defense personnel and congressmen. Fight your own bloody wars.”

Who could blame them?

William. T. Hanson, Dixfield


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