ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. –
Welcome to Tricare For Life
Tricare For Life offers secondary coverage to Medicare, minimizing your out-of-pocket expenses. Tricare for Life provides comprehensive health coverage and even pays Medicare's coinsurance and deductible. For services covered by both Medicare and Tricare, you'll pay nothing out of pocket.
Using Tricare For Life is easy: Go to any Medicare provider and get the care you need.
Your provider files the claims with Medicare. Medicare pays its portion and sends the remaining amount to Tricare.
While there's no enrollment for Tricare For Life, you do need to pay Medicare Part B premiums to remain eligible for Tricare For Life. To learn more about Medicare - Eligible Benefits please visit
http://www.tricare.mil, click on the link Medicare Eligibility Requirements.
New Medical Forms Will Streamline Veterans Claims Process
The Department of Veterans Affairs has released three new disability benefits questionnaires for physicians of Veterans applying for VA disability compensation benefits. This initiative marks the beginning of a major reform of the physicians' guides and automated routines that will streamline the claims process or injured or ill Veterans.
These new questionnaires are the first of 79 disability benefits questionnaires that will guide Veterans' personal physicians, as well as VA physicians, in the evaluation of the most frequent medical conditions affecting Veterans.
Accurate and timely medical evaluations are a critical element of VA's continued commitment to high-quality and prompt decisions about the nature and degree of conditions afflicting Veterans. Streamlining this process by directly involving Veterans' treating physicians in providing specific information needed to evaluate their claims will lead to completeness in the examination and faster compensation decisions.
For Veterans who receive their care from private physicians, VA has placed the disability benefits questionnaires on its Internet site,
http://www.vba.va.gov/disabilityexams, with instructions for physicians to submit examination results on Veterans' behalf.
The first three questionnaires cover B-cell leukemia (such as hairy-cell leukemia), Parkinson's disease, and ischemic heart disease. The VA recently published a final regulation to be implemented Oct. 30 that will establish the presumption of eligibility to VA disability compensation benefits for Veterans with one of these three conditions who were exposed to Agent Orange, a herbicide agent used extensively in Vietnam.
For additional information on the VA disability compensation program or additional presumptive disabilities for Veterans exposed to herbicide agents, contact the VA at 800-827-1000 or visit,
http://www.vba.va.gov/bln/21/AO/claimherbicide.htm.
The Retiree Activities Office is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. You may visit our office in room A-200A, 1535 Command Dr., call us at 301-981-2726 or e-mail us at rao@andrews.af.mil.
We recommend you call the office prior to visiting us to ensure someone is on duty. We have a website at http://www.andrews.af.mil click on ''Retirees" on the right side of the page. There you will find a wealth of information that is of interest to you.
Back copies of all "Retiree Activities Corner" articles are available on-line. Go to our Retirees webpage and follow the instructions under the heading "Newspaper Column."