TRICARE: RX for Military Medicine?

Can medical costs be contained while maintaining benefits, satisfaction, and access to good quality health care? As the nation struggles with this question, it can look to recent experience in military medicine as a microcosm of the national predicament. Faced with rapidly rising medical costs and a declining overall budget, the military has been trying out health care reforms that maintain benefits while containing costs. The most recent attempt at reform is the TRICARE Tidewater demonstration project in Virginia, which offers a military-operated, managed-care system to control costs while improving beneficiary satisfaction and access to care. Congress required an evaluation of the program for authorization. This paper describes the evaluation that CNA is conducting.