Tester: TriCare not doing enough for Montana's warriors

Democratic Montana Senator Jon Tester has been a veterans advocate since before he even went to Congress but through sequestration the Republican Party managed to cripple both the Veterans Health Administration and the Indian Health Service so GOP donors could push for privatization. 

Recall former Montana Sen. Max Baucus threw President Barack Obama's pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, former Senate Majority Leader and fellow Democrat Tom Daschle, under the bus during a pre-confirmation quarrel in 2009. Daschle was widely expected to push Congress toward a Medicaid-for-all health care plan in the weeks before Big Pharma-backed Baucus soundly rejected single-payer medical insurance and guided the passing of what would become the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 

During a 2017 bipartisan hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Sen. Tester said Congress should take a “solid look” at a single-payer health care system. Tester, who has been listening to various options including some intense lobbying from this blog, asked the panel of experts how to finance the health care system while controlling the costs.

“I’ve heard from far too many Montanans that TriCare isn’t working for them, and I’m concerned about the alarming number of issues with the program,” Tester said in a news release in advance of the roundtable in Great Falls. TriCare is the health care program offered by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to military personnel, retired veterans, and their dependents. “It’s not an issue of we’ve got too many providers, it’s an issue of we don’t have enough,” Tester responded. “We’ve got 17 veterans a day as of the last census that are committing suicide, and Montana’s suicide rate is the highest in the nation. There’s not enough people out there to take care of the problem, so that when somebody is in crisis, they have no help. We don’t have enough providers that are available to get on board and when they do, they’re libel [sic] not to work because it takes 45 to 60 days or longer to get paid. This is insane.” [Tester discusses 'alarming number of issues' with military healthcare]

Montana holds first place in 2023 but South Dakota is again the second most lucrative state to practice medicine thanks to its medical industry triopoly.

There is a growing movement among Democrats and others to fund Medicare for all but I like the idea of rolling the funding for Obamacare, TriCare, Medicare, the Indian Health Service and the VHA together then offering Medicaid for all by increasing the estate tax, raising taxes on tobacco and adopting a carbon tax.