Leanne Miller and Patricia Davis serve on a family member panel at the Defense Department's first National Leadership Summit on Military Families at the University of Maryland, Nov. 9, 2009. DoD photo by Elaine Wilson
By Elaine Wilson, AFPS
Elaine.wilson@dma.mil
Nov. 12, 2009
Earlier in the week, I wrote about nine amazing spouses who opened up about their military experiences — both good and bad — during a family member panel at the Defense Department’s first National Leadership Summit on Military Families.
They spoke passionately, and sometimes heatedly, about everything from child care to health care to education, all in the hope of initiating change. They represented each branch of service and a variety of backgrounds from active to reserve, “newbie” to seasoned military spouse.
In attendance at the summit were more than 200 military and civilian leaders who had gathered to discuss the effectiveness of the military’s family support and readiness programs as part of an ongoing effort to improve them.
Nine military spouses discuss a range of topics at a family member panel at the Defense Department's first National Leadership Summit on Military Families at the University of Maryland, Nov. 9, 2009. DoD photo by Elaine Wilson
In my earlier post, I shared the spouses’ candid thoughts on child care and education, and in today’s post, I’d like to focus on their comments on the state of military health care, including the needs of special needs children.
Anna Ours, wife of Army Sgt. 1st Class Ronald Ours of Fort Ashby, West Va., and mother to 22-year-old triplets, said reserve spouses, in particular, can have a tough road to navigate with health care.
Reserve and Guard families often are geographically dispersed from military posts, which can make accessing military health care challenging.
“Tricare is a lot better than it used to be,” Ours said. However, reserve spouses often “don’t understand what Tricare Prime Remote is.”
Tricare Prime Remote is available to active-duty servicemembers — including activated National Guard and Reserve members — and their families who live and work in designated remote locations, according to the Tricare Web site.
“We use civilian physicians, we only have a very limited amount of physicians that we can draw on and Tricare’s answer is, ‘If you don’t like it, go Standard,’” Ours said.
Tricare Standard is a fee-for-service plan available to all nonactive-duty beneficiaries throughout the United States, according to the Tricare site.
“If I lived near a military facility, I’d have quality health care there and I [would not] pay for it,” Ours said. “So why should I pay for it just because I’m geographically dispersed, which is not our fault? We’re meeting the needs of the Army. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges.”
Ours related a personal story to illustrate the difficulty she’s had accessing care. “I have triplets,” she said. “I have one daughter that has seizures. They’re nonepileptic seizures. Trying to find her a quality physician to see her to diagnose her was very difficult.”
Much of it boils down to knowledge, she said, and reserve spouses don’t receive essential health care indoctrination.
“Tricare is very difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, noting that it’s particularly tough for reserve spouses whose husbands are getting ready to deploy. “It’s a little bit more difficult because they don’t know who to go to,” she added.
Rondah Owings, wife of Navy Lt. Kenneth Owings, of NAB Coronado, Calif., said she definitely sees room for improvement across the board.
It’s tough “trying to access [medical care], getting an appointment,” she said. If there’s an immediate need, there may be a three-day wait for an appointment, but by then “he’ll be better,” she said.
Owings said it also would be beneficial if Tricare would cut down on wait times for beneficiaries calling for information.
On a different aspect of health care, the spouses turned to special needs children.
Samantha Moore, wife of Marine Corps Maj. David Moore of Marine Corps Base Quantico, said Tricare falls short when it comes to children diagnosed with autism.
She said experts recommend 25 to 40 hours of Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy a week for children, but Tricare only pays for 12 hours a week, “far below the minimum recommended.” She also said it can take from six to eight months to get all the needed referrals, which can add up to a lot of lost time during which parents can be seeking help for a child with special needs.
Karen Beaudreault, wife of Marine Corps Col. Brian Beaudreault, of Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., pointed out an issue concerning wait lists for special needs services.
“Each time the servicemember accepts a new set of orders and that family picks up and moves with that servicemember, even though the [special needs] services provided are federal through Medicare, each state runs those services individually,” she explained. “And the family, as a result, goes to the bottom of a waiting list each time they move to a new state.”
In North Carolina, for instance, the family may have been No. 33 on the list, but when they move to California, they start on the bottom of the list again, and so on, she said. “That’s time that special needs family could use those services,” Beaudreault said.
The spouses were then asked what they would do if they were in charge for a day, and several said they’d use those powers to heal their health care woes.
“If I were in charge for a day, I’d fix Tricare,” Moore said.
“I’d have someone to talk to” about health care and military issues in general, said Patricia Russell, representing the Air National Guard, “someone to help me figure it all out.”
While the panel brought forth many issues and concerns, the summit coordinators said they welcome the feedback.
Representatives from the Defense Department and land-grant universities will take the information from the panel, along with other issues raised at the summit and prepare a report with recommendations on ways to strengthen the development of a Defense Department strategic plan for military family support. The report is slated for completion in early 2010.
I’ll be sure to stay in touch with the summit coordinators and keep you posted on this report. It will be interesting to see the impact these nine spouses had.
It takes courage to come forward and speak up, but I believe by doing so, they will become an impetus for change for military families worldwide.