Top senior enlisted leaders for the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Space Force told lawmakers Wednesday that access to health care is the most substantive complaint they’re hearing lately from their troops.
During a hearing on quality-of-life issues before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s personnel subcommittee, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe cited a lack of available appointments for health care, and problems with Tricare’s reimbursement rates for health care providers in communities.
“What we’ve all seen over the length of our careers is a gradual erosion in the availability of that health care for our service members and their families,” Wolfe said.
This has been an issue for years, and problems with health care access have been exacerbated by new Tricare contracts implemented last year.
In spite of the time, effort and money spent on improving quality of life for service members and their families, “when you get down to the tactical level, there’s a gap,” said Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna. “They’re not feeling it day to day. They’re not feeling it around the kitchen table. They’re not feeling it when they call to get an appointment. They’re not feeling it when they try to get child care.”
The enlisted leaders talked about a range of issues, including their concerns about suicide and mental health, improvements to barracks, child care availability and uncertainty about pay related to federal shutdowns.
The services and the Defense Department have been working to increase child care slots. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., raised concerns about the persistent and long waitlists for military child care, citing waitlists of 7,800 children at the end of 2025.
“When I come back to ask these questions a year from now, are we still going to have a waitlist that’s 7,800 babies long?” she asked.
Warren contends the services haven’t done enough to attract and keep child care workers. The attrition rate is about 50% for child care workers in military child development centers, Warren said, and she criticized the Army, Navy and Air Force for not upgrading the pay scales by April 2025 as required by law.
When asked why they leave, workers say it’s low pay, according to Warren.
“You have the tools from Congress. We’ve already given them to you and you haven’t picked them up and used them,” she said.
However, Wolfe and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman said they’ve been told that their services have already upgraded their pay scales, and it has made a difference in the staffing.
“We have moved out with [using] the authorities. We are making significant progress in reducing our waitlist,” Perryman said, while noting it’s not okay to have 1,400 children still waiting for care.
“Right now, we’ve got about 2,700 [children] with unmet need across the Air Force. And that’s absolutely not where we want to be,” Wolfe said. “We are committed to making sure that this number goes down over time and does not creep back up.”
But Warren said parents don’t have time to wait. “They don’t have a year that they can just set aside while they’re waiting around on a 1,400 or 2,700 waitlist. They’ve got to have child care now.”
To the Space Force and Marine Corps, she said, “You nailed it. And let’s keep it up because that’s what we’ve got to do.
“We can’t say that we are a military that cares about our families if we pretend to provide child care and then we’ve got a waitlist that’s got 7,800 babies waiting on it.”
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book “A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families.” She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.
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