Military retirees under age 65 learned last week that they could face sharply higher healthcare costs under a plan by senior defense officials that would at least double TRICARE fees by 2008, and tie future fee increases to the annual percentage rise in healthcare costs nationwide.

Hundreds of retirees, upset by the news, are sending e-mails to this columnist and posting angry comments on Internet sites, contrasting the changes proposed to past promises of free lifetime healthcare if they stayed long enough to retire.

It's an echo of complaints heard in the mid-1990s from an older generation of retirees as they were being turned away from military hospitals and advised to use Medicare and buy supplemental insurance to meet their medical needs. The groundswell of complaints led to lawsuits, a grassroots effort to restore promised benefits, aggressive lobbying by service associations and, finally, to votes in Congress in 2000 to establish TRICARE for Life and TRICARE Senior Pharmacy for 1.5 million elderly retirees as well as spouses and survivors.

The situation is different for younger retirees. It is true that, just 15 years ago, some recruiters still were promising free lifetime care. In 1999, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, gave Congress quotes from a 1991 Army recruiting brochure promising "superb healthcare ... for the rest of your life if you serve a minimum of 20 years."

Still, the number of under-65 retirees citing promises of free healthcare is surprising, for two reasons. One, most of these retirees, unlike the older generation, have not been receiving free healthcare. They either are enrolled in TRICARE Prime, a managed-care plan that collects an annual fee and co-payments for doctor visits, or they use TRICARE Standard, the fee-for-service option, which carries a deductible. Patients also pay a hefty cost-share of any services received.

That so many younger retirees argue that they were promised free lifetime care is surprising also because the older generation of retirees lost that argument in court.

Coincidentally, the lawyer and war hero who led the legal fight, retired Air Force Col. George "Bud" Day, announced this month that he and his grassroots volunteers, which created Class Act Group to raise money for the court challenge, are giving up the fight Dec. 31. Day said retirees 65 and older "got about 95 percent" of medical benefits they had sought, but the gains weren't won in court. Instead, the case helped to influence Congress to correct an injustice to elderly beneficiaries by enacting the TRICARE for Life and the TRICARE Senior Pharmacy plan.

The lawsuit, Schism and Reinlie v. U.S., was decided Nov. 18, 2002, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. The court acknowledged "moral claims" by retirees to free lifetime healthcare but found no law or service regulation had authorized free, unconditional medical care. If recruiters promised that, even if ordered to do so by service leaders, the promises were invalid because they were not backed by law.

In June 2003, the Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

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