Jax Air News

The Navy base has a newspaper called the Jax Air News. We've been reading it since our first set of orders here in 1985. It's a pretty decent little paper, and one of the columns is just about my favorite thing to read locally all week long. Sarah Smiley has an always-interesting and mostly humorous look at all things to do with Navy Wife and Navy Family. This week she took a serious look at that ridiculous idea of BarryO's administration that thinks medical care for veterans wounded in combat should be billed to third party insurers. Please read, even though that proposal has been tabled...for now. With this bunch, the idea won't go away, they'll simply wait for a more opportune time. You knew that, didn't you?

Sarah says:
When I was a military dependent of my active-duty Navy dad in Portsmouth, Va., I broke my leg jumping off my piano teacher’s front porch.

I was taken to Portsmouth Naval Hospital (the old hospital, where tales of health care – and especially labor and deliveries – are legendary).

On this particular day, there was a shortage of the lightweight fiberglass material used in modern medicine to stabilize broken bones. In its place, Navy doctors wrapped my leg in plaster of Paris, which is the same material used to make some walls. Unlike its sleek fiberglass counterpart, plaster of Paris casts are thick, bumpy and somewhat chalky. I left the hospital with what felt (and looked) like a 10-pound chunk of wall on my leg. “But hey, it was free,” I said laughing when I explained the situation to my high school government class.

“Your cast wasn’t free,” a boy in the back of the class said. “All of our tax dollars paid for it.”

I was a knobby kneed teenager who still cared about what her peers thought. I didn’t come up with a good comeback until the class bell had rung and I was hobbling on crutches to my locker.

Free? My health care isn’t “free,” I thought. What does that punk know about “free” anyway? The next day, I told my classmate how “expensive” my health care really is. My dad had paid for it when he was halfway across the world, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, when his first daughter was born. He paid for it when he didn’t meet me until I was seven months old. He paid for it with every missed piano recital, Christmas, and birthday.

He accumulated 11 years of sea duty by the time I was 22 years old. Our family also paid in ways most people would consider unacceptable and too “costly.” Imagine: instead of paying a monthly premium, your insurance company requires you to be at their service, at any time, in any place, even if it means that you will miss half of your child’s childhood.

Oh, and you might have to put your life on the line, too. True, my classmate and his parents had also paid in part for my health care, but then, they never had to deal with deployments either.

Read the whole thing!