Military families in Atlanta and Tampa have a new, unique Tricare Prime choice

For years, TRICARE open season felt like something you endured, not something you got excited about. You make sure nothing breaks, confirm your coverage still exists, and move on. This year is different for military families and veterans in the Atlanta and Tampa regions. For the first time in a long time, there’s a real choice inside TRICARE Prime, and it comes with some very practical, day-to-day advantages.

Read Next: For-profit VA disability company exposed in NPR investigation

On the Tango Tango podcast, host Lloyd Knight sat down with Holly Joers of CareSource Military & Veterans to unpack what this new option actually means. The conversation covered everything from football and Thanksgiving travel to the fine print of health policy, but the core message was simple: if you live in Atlanta or Tampa and are eligible for TRICARE Prime, you now have another lane to pick, and switching into it could change how you interact with the healthcare system next year.

TRICARE open season runs from Nov. 10 through Dec. 9. Coverage under any changes you make starts January 1. If you do nothing, you stay with your current TRICARE option. If you want to move into the CareSource Military & Veterans TRICARE Prime plan, you have to actively choose it during that window. That’s the foundation everything else sits on.

TRICARE itself is familiar territory for most military families. It’s the health benefit tied to service, covering active-duty family members, retirees, retiree families, and survivors. Lloyd mentions he has been retired for nearly 19 years and has spent almost all of that time in TRICARE Prime. His experience will sound familiar to many: the benefit works, most of the time, but it has not exactly been known for competition or ease of use. The traditional referral process, in particular, has been a sore spot.

The CareSource offering exists because Congress decided to push on that status quo. In the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers directed the Department of Defense to test whether adding competition and choice inside TRICARE Prime could improve access and outcomes. The result is a three-year “competitive plans demonstration” in two markets, Atlanta and Tampa, where CareSource Military & Veterans now offers a TRICARE Prime plan alongside the legacy option. It’s still TRICARE, still Prime, still under the larger Defense Health Agency umbrella. The difference lies in who manages the plan and how it’s designed.

CareSource itself is not new. It is a nonprofit health plan that started in Ohio and has spent decades working with Medicaid and other vulnerable populations. Long before “social determinants of health” became a buzzword, CareSource was helping members navigate things like transportation, housing, and access to food because those needs affect medical outcomes. For the demonstration, they built a dedicated arm—CareSource Military & Veterans, or CSMV—to focus on the military-connected community.

One detail from the podcast that stands out is that the entire CSMV team is in some way affiliated with the military. Some are veterans, some are spouses, some grew up in military families. Holly herself spent her career in the Department of Defense, starting as a logistics specialist at Eglin Air Force Base, moving into test program management, working on the F-35 program, and eventually landing in health IT and modernization at the Defense Health Agency. She also happens to be a retired military spouse. Her path means she’s seen the system from the inside as a civil servant and felt it from the outside as a family member.

That perspective shows up in the features they chose to emphasize. The one that immediately grabbed Lloyd’s attention is straightforward: no referrals are required for in-network specialty care under the CareSource Military & Veterans TRICARE Prime plan. Under traditional TRICARE Prime, seeing a specialist often requires a mini-campaign. You book an appointment with your primary care manager, wait for that visit, secure a referral, and then wait again to see the specialist. For people juggling chronic conditions, multiple kids, or demanding work schedules, that loop eats time and patience.

With the demonstration plan, if the specialist is in-network, you can go directly to that provider without going back through the government referral process. Lloyd actually admits he’s been sitting on a stack of needed appointments and is waiting until January 1 so he can make them under the new plan without running the referral gauntlet. It’s a small change on paper that can feel like a big change in real life.

The program is not just about convenience, though. Holly spends a good portion of the conversation talking about coordinated, team-based care for those with complex medical needs. CareSource uses care managers and integrated care teams to help keep all of a member’s providers on the same page. Anyone who has ever recited their full medical history to every new doctor knows how draining and inefficient that can be. The idea here is that the system, not the patient, should be doing most of the connecting and repeating.

Lt. Cmdr. Lawson “Red” Ramage made history as the skipper of the USS Parche.

They escaped slavery, built free communities, and outmaneuvered the U.S. Army.

Getting help with a VA claim is free through accredited organizations like the VFW.

There’s also a detail that matters more to providers than patients, but which indirectly shapes access: CareSource pays claims quickly. Holly notes that the plan runs payments on a rolling Tuesday and Thursday schedule. For big hospital systems, cash flow delays are annoying. For small practices, independent specialists, and behavioral health providers, they can be existential. When a plan takes months to pay, some providers simply avoid it. A plan that pays reliably and quickly can be more attractive to those clinicians, which can translate into stronger networks for members.

The financial side for beneficiaries is part of the demonstration as well. For TRICARE Prime families who enroll with CareSource Military & Veterans, the enrollment fee is waived for the first year. In a world where costs seem to creep up everywhere, starting a new plan year without that fee is not a trivial benefit.

Atlanta and Tampa make interesting test beds in their own right. Atlanta is heavy on retirees and veterans spread across a wide metro area, with the usual traffic and distance problems that come with that. Tampa has a stronger active-duty footprint and a different mix of needs, but its own congestion and access challenges. In both cities, CareSource is leaning on local partnerships with veteran organizations and community groups to help families understand their options and find resources beyond just the health plan itself. Holly mentions conversations with key spouses and rural families in Georgia in particular, where distance and fewer local providers make choice and coordination even more critical.

For those who remember a previous TRICARE-related effort with Kaiser Permanente, Holly draws a helpful comparison. Kaiser’s model was largely a closed health system, where you receive care inside Kaiser facilities. CareSource, by contrast, is a health plan that builds a network across multiple health systems and independent providers. That open-network structure gives the demonstration a different flavor and potentially more flexibility in how beneficiaries access care.

None of this matters, of course, if people treat this open season like every other one and click past it. The most important practical point in the entire conversation is that default inertia still applies. If you are in the Atlanta or Tampa markets and do nothing by Dec. 9, you stay right where you are. If you like the sound of no in-network referrals, coordinated care teams, fast provider payments, a first-year fee waiver, and a plan purpose-built for military families by people who have actually lived that life, you have to raise your hand.

Enrolling follows the usual pattern: you can go through the online portal with your DS Logon credentials or call the toll-free number if the tech gives you trouble. Lloyd notes that when one of the Department of Defense systems had issues, CareSource steered people to the phones, and the process still went smoothly. He and his wife received their new cards in the mail shortly after.

The larger question hovering in the background is what happens after the three-year demonstration ends, and whether this idea of competition inside TRICARE Prime spreads beyond Atlanta and Tampa. Holly is careful not to overpromise. Congress and the Defense Health Agency are watching closely to see what works and what does not. If you live somewhere else and want similar options, the same rule that applies to almost everything in federal policy applies here: if you care about it, tell your representatives.

For now, the most immediate decision belongs to those within driving distance of Atlanta or Tampa. TRICARE open season is short, the holidays are noisy, and it is easy to let another year roll past without changing anything. This time, though, change is actually on the table. The Tango Tango episode is a reminder that the fine print of policy can show up in very practical ways in your daily life: how many appointments you juggle, how often you explain your story, how long you wait, and how much you pay. In this corner of the TRICARE world, at least for the next three years, you actually get to choose.

Don’t Miss the Best of We Are The Mighty

• 79 cringeworthy errors in ‘Top Gun’
• 5 seldom-told tales about Air Force legends
• How fighter jets can ‘headbutt’ enemy planes

6 steps to start using Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits for the next school year

Randall Stevens is a military veteran with more degrees than he knows what to do with. He enjoys writing and traveling, and has an unnatural obsession with Harry Houdini.