If Washington’s defense community has achieved one thing over the past year, it’s spreading the message of how the fiscal cliff could desecrate the military. Sequestration cuts of $55 billion would jeopardize weapons contracts, furlough civilian staff, and imperil national security, defense hawks say/.../
Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments describes another unpleasant possibility: Health care providers could ration care. “You could have some sort of triage system where you say, ‘If this is something that can wait, a low priority, we’re not going to see you,’ and focus care on some of the highest-priority patients,” Harrison says. To fix the problem, Congress could amend the Budget Control Act to let Obama exempt defense health care, too. In that case, though, other defense accounts (which the sequester will already cut by 9.4 percent) would face a much steeper reduction than the 8.2 percent falloff in nondefense spending.