TRICARE is great, but it is important to check all your health insurance options! Choosing a good insurance plan was especially important for us this year since we welcomed a baby girl into our family. We have private insurance through the State of Illinois. I am a state employee, and it turned out that private insurance was a better option for us than TRICARE Reserve Select. In our area, TRICARE is only accepted as a “Non-Network Provider” option. While this can be acceptable depending on how much coverage you have or need, in our case, we didn’t want to risk having to pay out of pocket and then being reimbursed later. Our private insurance is a low deductible option. The monthly cost is higher than TRICARE, but since the deductible is so low, our out-of-pocket cost ends up being about the same, plus we don’t have to worry about reimbursements or certain things not being covered through TRICARE due to our doctors being non-network providers. And, if we wanted to, we could still use TRICARE as our secondary insurance!