Tricare meets Health Care Bill's Standards: Gates

New York, Mar 22 : The Tricare military health plan meets the standards set by the health care reform bill the House of Representatives passed last night, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in a statement.

Calling their health and well-being his highest priority, Gates reassured service members and their families that the legislation won't have a negative effect on Tricare, which "already meets the bill's quality and minimum benefit standards."

"This was clarified by a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives [March 20], and is expected to be re-affirmed by the Senate," Gates said in the statement.

"The president and I are committed to seeing that our troops, retirees and their families will continue to receive the best quality health care," the secretary said.

The US Congress has passed a historic healthcare reform bill that will give nearly every American the right to health coverage, also handing down a major victory for President Barack Obama.

"We proved we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling big challenges. This is what change looks like, tonight we answered the call of history," Obama was quoted by the UK Telegraph as stating after the bill was passed.

His victory came by a narrow margin of 219 to 212, with all Republicans and 34 Democrats opposing.

But it secured the most sweeping domestic reform since the 1960s that a few weeks ago seemed dead and buried when the Democrats lost a crucial Senate by-election in Massachusetts.

Though the president will sign the bill into law, the process will not end until later in the week, when Democrats in the Senate are expected to complete a complex set of manoeuvres that will create a compromise bill.

Obama agreed to issue an executive order as soon as the bill was passed that would prevent any circumvention of the existing ban on federal funding of elective abortions, which a small group of Catholic Democrats said was threatened by the language of the bill, the UK Telegraph report said.

Together, the Senate bill and package of changes would remake US health care, a century after then-president Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, called for a national approach, extending coverage to some 32 million Americans who currently lack it.

The cost at USD 940 billion over ten years is huge, but the bill is forecast to save USD 1.3 trillion over the next 20 years.

It would ban insurance company practices like denying care for pre-existing conditions, imposing lifetime caps on coverage, while providing subsidies to buy private insurance in newly-created marketplaces called "exchanges".

Republicans have vowed to keep up the fight in the Senate - the next battleground - and to repeal the broadly unpopular bill if they win back majorities in November's midterms elections, the UK Telegraph report added.