It's time to stop downsizing health care, the Pentagon says. This couple can't wait

When Matt and Helen Perry first met in 2010, he had been a U.S. Marine long enough to form two strong opinions. He didn't like the U.S. Army, and he didn't like officers — which he told her on their first date.

"And I was, you know, an Army medical officer," Helen recalls.

They got married anyhow, and Matt went on the last of his four combat deployments while Helen worked at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, D.C. Her worst fear — that she'd see Matt come in on a medevac — never came to pass. She did start to worry though, about the military medical system that was treating troops and their families. In 2013 the Perrys were stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga.

"They were looking at closing Winn Army Medical Community Medical Hospital," says Perry.

Winn Hospital cares for tens of thousands of troops and more than twice that many family members and military retirees living near Fort Stewart. But the Pentagon was abuzz with plans to cut military medical costs, especially on families and retirees, by outsourcing them to local private health care — much to the chagrin of local providers, Helen Perry recalls.

"I vividly remember them putting out an article in the newspaper that was like ... 'wW cannot absorb your obstetrical care. We can't absorb your inpatient care. We do not have the resources to absorb the amount of care that you would then be pushing out into the community,' " says Perry.

Obstetrics may not spring to mind when people think about military medicine, but troops get to have families. With the Pentagon pushing them off base to find care, the military hospitals lost the patient base they needed to justify keeping specialty clinicians. It didn't make sense to Perry.

"I was saying, well,