Defense Health Care: Issues and Challenges Confronting Military Medicine
Abstract
The nation's health care system continues to change substantially as governments, employers, and consumers try to address significant increases in medical care costs and issues of access to high quality medical care. As a large component of this system, the Department of Defense's (DOD) military health care system is also confronting significant challenge and change. This system performs many difficult and interrelated missions, including providing medical services and support to active-duty members of the armed forces both in peacetime and in war and health care to the families of active-duty personnel, military retirees, their dependents, and survivors. Post-cold war contingency planning scenarios, efforts to reduce the overall size of the nation's military forces, federal budget reduction initiatives, and base closures and realignments have heightened scrutiny of the size and makeup of DOD'S health care system, how it operates, who it serves, and whether its missions can be satisfactorily carried out in a more cost-effective way. In preparation for your Subcommittee's authorization and oversight responsibilities for military health care, you asked us to describe the Military Health Services System (MHSS), past problems faced by DOD as it operated the system and its efforts to overcome those problems, and the management challenges now confronting DOD.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 1995
- Accession Number
- AD1167475
Entities
People
- David P. Baine
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office