Page 3

MOAA LEGISLATIVE UPDATES

Issue 1: No Concurrent Receipt in Budget Resolution          As this update was being written, legislators were moving closer to final agreement on a FY2004 Budget Resolution. On Friday morning, the House passed a com-promise version by a slim margin, and it appears that the Republican leadership in the Senate will garner enough votes to ensure passage. Unfortunately, this final version left out the Senate's proposed funding for a partial concurrent receipt provision.

     Aside from ever-present cost concerns, legislators are still awaiting the final verdict from DoD on who will qualify for the recently enacted special compensation for combat or operationally disabled retirees. Since we won't know anything new until May or June, they were reluctant to reprise the divisive battle they fought to a stalemate last year.

     Even without a clear road ahead on concurrent receipt funding, we'll continue to work for expansion of the special compensation, and additions to the DoD eligibility criteria -- especially the need to include Guard and Reserve retirees. Just as important, we'll continue to gather congressional support for full concurrent receipt. H.R. 303 and S. 392 have 257 and 53 co-sponsors, respectively, remarkable totals this early in the Congressional session. We will continue to push the message to legislators that this issue won't go away until they eliminate the disability offset and provide equity for disabled retirees.

Issue 2: More Bills to Improve SBP

     On April 2, Rep. Jim Saxton (R-NJ) introduced H.R. 1653, a bill that would accelerate the date at which long-term SBP enrollees may stop paying premiums for coverage.

     In 1998, MOAA and our Military Coalition partners were successful in achieving legislation to allow long-term SBP enrollees to stop paying premiums after thirty years. However, for cost reasons, legislators pushed the implementation date back to October 1, 2008. This meant that retirees who signed on when the program first started in 1972 would bear the heaviest burden, with many paying SBP premiums for thirty-six years.

     H.R. 1653 would change the implementation date of the paid-up provision to October 1, 2003, thus easing the

     Also this week, Rep. Henry Brown, Jr., (R-SC) introduced H.R. 1726, a bill to eliminate the offset between Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) and Survivor Benefit Plan Annuities. Brown's bill follows in the footsteps of S. 585, which Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) introduced several weeks ago. MOAA believes that SBP and DIC are paid for different reasons, and that survivors whose spouses die of service-connected causes should receive their DIC payments as a "double indemnity" compensation from the VA, without having those payments deducted from the SBP retirees paid for. We hope that Congress will agree.

     If you would like to send an MOAA-prepared message to your legislators in support of these bills, please visit: http://capwiz.com/moaa/issues/bills/. Just click on the applicable bill number and enter your ZIP code in the box to see the draft messages.

MOAA's Legislative Update for Friday, April 25, 2003:

Issue 3: Congress returns next week to take up the FY2004 Defense Authorization Bill.

     The SBP and concurrent receipt, because the Armed Services Committees weren't given Budget Resolution authority to address the big ticket items, no funding was appropriated and will have to come to the House and Senate floor.

Issue 4: Pay raises shouldn't vary by service.

      Congress is considering the Administration's proposal to cap the 2004 pay raise for commissioned officers of the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at 2%, vs. the 4.1% raise proposed for the other five uniformed services. Current law requires equal pay scales for all services. Both of these services are a vital part of the combined services to single out as capping pay. The next thing will be capping another service. If you disagree with this action, log on to the Web site at http://capwiz.com/moaa/home/. The next action will probably be capping another service and will lead to other such non-appropriate action