Behavioral Health Care for National Guard and Reserve Service Members from the Military Health System

M ore than one-third of U.S. military personnel are members of the National Guard or reserves, collectively known as the reserve component (RC). More than 1 million RC personnel serve alongside the 1.3 million full-time military service members of the active component (AC) (Kapp and Torreon, 2020). The Military Health System (MHS) aims to improve the health of all military personnel, provide the highest quality of care possible, maintain low per capita health care costs, and support overall military readiness. These goals are the cornerstone of MHS efforts and are collectively known as the MHS Quadruple Aim (Defense Health Agency, 2013; Defense Manpower Data Center, 2019). Behavioral health (BH) care is among the services that the MHS provides, but there has been little research to date on the quality of the BH care that RC service members receive or how their care compares with that of AC service members. This report provides a targeted comparative analysis of how BH care utilization and quality vary between the RC and AC and whether care quality differs for RC personnel as a function of their geographic remoteness from a military treatment facility (MTF). The findings may have implications for MHS policy and decisionmaking. C O R P O R A T I O N